Industry worldwide has been undergoing a tremendous digital transformation featuring the convergence of information/communications technology and operation technology in various segments. This ushers in an era of fully connected machines, controllers, platforms and storage systems running in nearby factories or remote data centers, and the sharing of open data among them. The digitized information fused with analytics is expected to shed new light on industrial planning, operations and maintenance processes, while changing business in a fundamental way, not only through streamlined process and optimized production, but also by enabling new business models.

In a nutshell, industry digitization involves the connection of massive numbers of machines and people, with open data sharing and a generic ICT infrastructure to support them. In this Paper the authors promote the concept of 5G Network Slicing to implement the connectivity of innumerable industrial nodes with various needs, unleashing the potential benefits of digitization. Use cases are presented to illustrate how a network slice can be utilized to redefine information sharing in a wide variety of industrial scenarios, ranging from ultra-reliable low-latency machine communications to the small-packet bursty transmission of operations data.

This Paper shares a cross industry understanding of how Network Slicing can enable and accelerate digital transformation in industry verticals1. It can also serve as the basis to inspire future efforts to investigate business rationale, derive technical requirements and unveil the financial values of Network Slicing.