5G Network Slicing: Empowering Vertical Industries
The emergence of 5G networks is based on the vision of providing very high data rates, wider coverage area, enhanced throughput, delay-less services, and signicantly better Quality-of-Services (QoS). It is not just an upper version of 4G systems but is much more beyond that in terms of technological capabilities and service provision. Current wireless network systems have become insufcient to manage user requirements, which are tremendously increasing on daily basis, due to their limited resources. 5G wireless network is expected to accommodate several times larger customers and their increasing data trafc efciently. Some of the characteristics of 5G are:
- 1-10Gbps connection, which is almost 10 times higher than the traditional LTE network’s theoretical peak data rate of 150 Mbps
- 10-100x devices interconnected all the time via the Internet.
- Availability of 99.999%
- Round trip latency of 1 ms, which is a reduction of almost 10 times from 4G’s round trip latency of 10 ms.
- 90% reduced power consumption of network, and 10 years long battery life for low power consumption devices.
- ‘Anytime Anywhere’ connectivity coverage of almost 100%
- Reduction in energy consumption by 90%.
Moreover, some crucial new techniques will also become part of 5G networks such as New Radio on Unlicensed band (NR-U), NR Vehicle-to-X (V2X), software-dened network (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), with new features including diversied terminals, large number of nodes, ultra-high density node deployment, the coexistence of multiple wireless technologies and security schemes, and Network Slicing.
The idea of network slicing is a signicant part of 5G networks. 5G provides the connection of multiple devices to communicate with each other over the Internet, allowing it to support IoT. The main technology behind 5G, which is allowing it to support multiple and diverse devices and services simultaneously is the network slicing technology.
Network slicing originates from the concept of network virtualization techniques to deploy multiple logical/virtual systems that run on top of a single shared physical network architecture. The main objective behind using network slicing is to divide the physical network resources to optimally group different trafc and congure the network resources at a macro level. There is a separation between each slice in terms of case/eld with specic necessary operations. The network slicing divides a single common physical network into various virtual end-to-end (E2E) networks. While performing the division, the target is to customize and optimize each network with respect to resources, QoS, and security.
5G Network Slicing: Empowering Vertical Industries
