5G Network Requirement Analysis and Slice Dimensioning for Sustainable Vehicular Services

The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communications together with software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are expected to enable a wide range of vertical use-cases. Different vertical industries with diverse service streams and sets of requirements should leverage the advanced capabilities of 5G networks through a single infrastructure to support the desired Quality of Service/Experience (QoS/QoE). In this paper, we focus on the Transport vertical and we study four novel service categories, each one consisting of one or more related scenarios, within the framework of the 5G Health, Aquaculture and Transport (5G-HEART) 5G PPP Phase 3 project. The first pass analysis of the envisioned vehicular services and their underlying operation, combined with the mapping of the mostly high-level functional user requirements to quantitative network Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) via a thorough and concise methodology, is essential for future testing with real pilots. Furthermore, our work paves the way towards efficient network slicing by exploring the interrelations between the identified KPIs and the respective target values that must be simultaneously satisfied over the same physical network infrastructure, in the context of the three 5G generic services.