Latency-Sensitive 5G RAN Slicing for Deterministic Aperiodic Traffic in Smart Manufacturing

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitations of existing 5G radio access network (RAN) slicing approaches, which prioritize data rate alone and fail to meet the stringent latency requirements of deterministic aperiodic traffic in smart manufacturing. To overcome this, the paper proposes a novel RAN slicing design that jointly considers both rate and latency, explicitly incorporating delay constraints into the core resource allocation framework—thereby moving beyond conventional bandwidth-only partitioning. By introducing a unified rate–latency service descriptor and optimizing wireless resource scheduling accordingly, the proposed scheme effectively guarantees deterministic aperiodic communication for critical services. Experimental results demonstrate its significant superiority over traditional bandwidth-centric slicing mechanisms in latency-sensitive scenarios.

Abstract

5G and beyond networks will support the digitalization of smart manufacturing thanks to their capacity to simultaneously serve different types of traffic with distinct QoS requirements. This can be achieved using Network Slicing that creates different logical network partitions (or slices) over a common infrastructure, and each can be tailored to support a particular type of traffic. The configuration of the Radio Access Network (RAN) slices strongly impacts the capacity of 5G and beyond to support critical services with stringent QoS requirements, and in particular deterministic requirements. Existing RAN Slicing solutions only consider the transmission rate (or bandwidth) requirements of the different services to partition the radio resources. This study demonstrates that this approach is not suitable to guarantee the stringent latency requirements of deterministic aperiodic traffic that is characteristic of industrial critical applications. We then propose designing RAN slices using descriptors that consider both the services' transmission rate and latency requirements, and demonstrate that this approach can support critical services that generate deterministic aperiodic traffic.

Problem

• RAN slicing
• deterministic aperiodic traffic
• latency requirements
• smart manufacturing
• 5G networks

Innovation

• RAN slicing
• deterministic aperiodic traffic
• latency-sensitive
• 5G network slicing
• smart manufacturing