5G Network Slicing for Mission-critical use cases

The demand for prehospital emergency care has increased during the last decades throughout the Western world, in terms of numbers of emergency calls and dispatched ambulances. This development represents a challenge for both the prehospital emergency systems and the emergency departments at the hospitals [1]. Stroke is the fourth single leading cause of death in the UK and an accurate recognition of stroke by in-ambulance or emergency medical services (EMS) or prehospital ambulance paramedics, offers significant potential to reduce delays in presentation and treatment in acute stroke [2]. This paper demonstrates Proof-of-Concept (PoC) approaches for 5G network slicing in mission-critical use cases from the H2020 5G PPP SliceNet project, which is implementing an End-to-End (E2E) cognitive network slicing and slice management framework in virtualised multi-domain, multi-tenant 5G Networks. The paper shows how the PoC's key enablers, such as QoS-aware network slicing, edge computing and hardware acceleration, can assist with a continuous collection, processing and streaming of patient data that could shorten the time to assess and provide optimal clinical treatment pathways for potential stroke patients.