Performance Analysis of 5G RAN Slicing Deployment Options in Industry 4.0 Factories
This work addresses the design of RAN slicing deployment options for Industry 4.0 factories with multiple production lines and heterogeneous flows, representing an incremental improvement over prior works focused on management architectures or resource allocation under fixed slicing structures.
This paper tackles the problem of designing Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing deployment options for 5G Industry 4.0 networks with ultra-reliable low-latency communication requirements, finding that per-flow slicing prevents delay violations under resource scarcity by tightly matching resources to per-flow delay targets, while slice-sharing and hybrid deployments improve aggregation efficiency but weaken protection for delay-critical flows.
This paper studies Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing strategies for 5G Industry~4.0 networks with ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) requirements. We comparatively analyze four RAN slicing deployment options that differ in slice sharing and per-line or per-flow isolation. Unlike prior works that focus on management architectures or resource allocation under a fixed slicing structure, this work addresses the design of RAN slicing deployment options in the presence of multiple production lines and heterogeneous industrial flows. An SNC-based analytical framework and a heuristic slice planner are used to evaluate these options in terms of per-flow delay guarantees and radio resource utilization. Results show that under resource scarcity only per-flow slicing prevents delay violations by tightly matching resources to per-flow delay targets, while slice-sharing and hybrid deployments improve aggregation efficiency at the cost of weaker protection for the most delay-critical flows. Execution-time results confirm that the planner operates at Non-RT time scales, enabling its integration within O-RAN Non-RT RIC loops.