Effects of transport network slicing on 5g applications

Yi-Bing Lin, Chien-Chao Tseng, Ming Hung Wang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

Network slicing is considered a key technology in enabling the underlying 5G mobile network infrastructure to meet diverse service requirements. In this article, we demonstrate how transport network slicing accommodates the various network service requirements of Massive IoT (MIoT), Critical IoT (CIoT), and Mobile Broadband (MBB) applications. Given that most of the research conducted previously to measure 5G network slicing is done through simulations, we uti-lized SimTalk, an IoT application traffic emulator, to emulate large amounts of realistic traffic pat-terns in order to study the effects of transport network slicing on IoT and MBB applications. Fur-thermore, we developed several MIoT, CIoT, and MBB applications that operate sustainably on several campuses and directed both real and emulated traffic into a Programming Protocol‐Independ-ent Packet Processors (P4)‐based 5G testbed. We then examined the performance in terms of throughput, packet loss, and latency. Our study indicates that applications with different traffic characteristics need different corresponding Committed Information Rate (CIR) ratios. The CIR ratio is the CIR setting for a P4 meter in physical switch hardware over the aggregated data rate of applications of the same type. A low CIR ratio adversely affects the application’s performance be-cause P4 switches will dispatch application packets to the low‐priority queue if the packet arrival rate exceeds the CIR setting for the same type of applications. In our testbed, both exemplar MBB applications required a CIR ratio of 140% to achieve, respectively, a near 100% throughput percentage with a 0.0035% loss rate and an approximate 100% throughput percentage with a 0.0017% loss rate. However, the exemplar CIoT and MIoT applications required a CIR ratio of 120% and 100%, respectively, to reach a 100% throughput percentage without any packet loss. With the proper CIR settings for the P4 meters, the proposed transport network slicing mechanism can enforce the committed rates and fulfill the latency and reliability requirements for 5G MIoT, CIoT, and MBB applications in both TCP and UDP.

Original languageEnglish
Article number69
Pages (from-to)1-17
Number of pages17
JournalFuture Internet
Volume13
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2021

Keywords

  • Critical IoT (CIoT)
  • Fifth generation network (5G)
  • Internet of Things (IoT)
  • Massive IoT (MIoT)
  • Network Slicing
  • Programming Protocol‐Independent Packet Processors (P4)
  • Software-Defined Network (SDN)

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