The work presented in ETFA by UMH addresses the Network Slicing paradigm in 5G networks to support Industry 4.0 applications. Network slicing creates different logical partitions or instances over a common network infrastructure. The different slices need to be configured with the required resources and management functions necessary to comply with the requirements of the different services they support. The work developed by UMH particularly focusses on the Radio Access Network (RAN). UMH proposes a new latency-based RAN slice descriptor that identifies the radio resources that need to be allocated to a RAN slice to efficiently satisfy the latency requirement of the supported service. Latency and determinism are some of the main requirements of most Industry 4.0 applications. For example, motion control requests a maximum of 2 ms latency, control-to-control applications have latency requirements equal to 4 ms, and factory automation requests a maximum latency between 0.25 and 10 ms. In this context, the use of a latency-based RAN slice descriptor is critical to meet the latency requirements of Industry 4.0 applications as demonstrated in the work presented in ETFA by UMH.

The paper is now available in UWICORE.