Service Level Agreements for 5G and Beyond: Overview, Challenges and Enablers of 5G-Healthcare Systems

Abstract

5G and beyond networks will transform the healthcare sector by opening possibilities for novel use cases and applications. Service level agreements (SLAs) can enable 5G-enabled medical device use cases by documenting how a medical device communication requirements are met by the unique characteristics of 5G networks and the roles and responsibilities of the stakeholders involved in offering safe and effective 5G-enabled healthcare to patients. However, there are gaps in this space that should be addressed to facilitate the efficient implementation of 5G technology in healthcare. Current literature is scarce regarding SLAs for 5G and is absent regarding SLAs for 5G-enabled medical devices. This paper aims to bridge these gaps by identifying key challenges, providing insight, and describing open research questions related to SLAs in 5G and specifically 5G-healthcare systems. This is helpful to network service providers, users, and regulatory authorities in developing, managing, monitoring, and evaluating SLAs in 5G-enabled medical systems.

Smart healthcare IoT applications based on fog computing: architecture, applications and challenges

“…In [ 6 ], the authors achieved an approximate optimal offloading schema. Some other studies in [ 8 , 10 ] improved computing costs and reduced response times.…”

“…5G allows providing services with ultra-low latency and ultra-high bandwidth [ 6 , 7 ]. The advent of 5G realizes the concept of the Internet of Things and forms a series of smart applications serving humanity such as smart healthcare [ 8 ], intelligent transportation systems [ 9 ], smart cities [ 10 ], smart retail [ 11 ], smart agriculture [ 12 ], and IoT ecosystems [ 13 , 14 ] as presented in Fig. 1 .…”

Energy-Aware Service Level Agreements in 5G NFV architecture

“…Authors of [12] did an overview of SLA in 5G. They identified few research papers that deal with this topic [13]- [19].…”

Multiplexing Techniques for Applications Based-on 5G Systems

“…The increasing number of not only smart phones, tablets and laptops but also the huge number of other devices such as IoT (Internet of Things) nodes, wearable devices for healthcare will demand significant challenges in 5G systems to manage a huge amount of devices and connections [2]. Besides, the exponential growth of mobile video services (e.g., live video streaming, online video gaming, mobile TV) requires wider bandwidth and higher spectral efficiency than that of 4G systems [3].…”