A 5G Mobile Network Architecture to Support Vertical Industries

Abstract

The telecom industry is moving from a "horizontal" service delivery model, where services are defined independently from their consumers, towards a "vertical" delivery model, where the provided services are tailored to specific industry sectors and verticals. In order to enable this transition, an end-to-end comprehensive 5G architecture is needed, with capabilities to support the use cases of the different vertical industries. A key feature of this architecture is the implementation of network slicing over a single infrastructure to provision highly heterogeneous vertical services, as well as a network slicing management system capable of handling simultaneous slices. On top of the network slicing technology, functionality needs to be devised to deploy the slices required by the different vertical players and provide them with a suitable interface to manage their slice. In this paper, we design a 5G mobile network architecture to support vertical industries. The proposed architecture builds on ongoing standardization efforts at 3GPP and ETSI and incorporates additional modules to provide enhanced MANO and control functionality as well as artificial intelligence-based data analytics; on top of these modules, a service layer is provided to offer vertical players an easy-to-use interface to manage their services.

Verticals in 5G MEC-Use Cases and Security Challenges

“…Besides the dynamic distribution of network functionalities, new technologies enable Telecoms to provide new types of services that are not directly connected with the operation of the network itself but can enhance its operation [140]. An example of such a scenario can be MEC which allows run-ning service logic closer to the user [141], [142].…”

Edge Intelligence in Private Mobile Networks for Next-Generation Railway Systems

“…Additionally, with such an IPN framework, broadcasting to and from all the connected devices at one time is also an essential component. For the implementation of broadcasting, it would require Intelligent B5G-Xcast (IBX) by leveraging the findings of point to point (PTP), point to multipoint (PTM), and 5G-Xcast project (Banchs et al, 2019). The use of laser-based IoT devices to monitor and subsequently recommend safe distances from the toxic gases found in underground confined areas also has utmost importance for safety purposes.…”

Resource Allocation for Network Slicing in Mobile Networks

“…Meeting extreme reliability and latency requirements. In 5G networks, some network slices may have extreme requirements in terms of reliability and/or latency [35]. This ultimately requires that sufficient resources be allocated to such network slices, so as to ensure that resources will suffice to (i) cover the demands at all times with a very high probability and (ii) schedule the frames of such slices providing very low latencies.…”