Reliability is crucial in the fiercely-competitive mobile network service provider environment. 5G application virtualization and cloud deployment introduce an entirely new dimension to the vendor requirements process. The ability to separate software from hardware, and select different vendors for each, creates the need to rationally allocate the quantifiable reliability requirements between these layers of separation in a multi-vendor virtualized environment. In this work, we define a comprehensive set of service-level reliability metrics, and develop a novel methodology to allocate these metrics to the service delivery platform layers using natural tunable parameters.
