Avoiding Keep-Alive Messages by exposing 5G Channel State Information to Applications

Bandwidth is a scarce resource in industrial wireless networks. At the same time keep-alive-messages are excessively used in these networks to test channel characteristics. This work proposes an approach to reduce bandwidth usage in critical industrial applications, by exploiting channel quality data from 5G. Thereby, the information about the channel is gained from channel state information (CSI) and the radio resource control (RRC) state. This work combines the CSI with the RRC state to determine whether a wireless node is connected. Subsequently, the connection information is exposed towards the application server via the network exposure function (NEF) of the 5G core network and to the mobile application by the UE. Since the CSI and RRC state are always present, this results in a net bandwidth reduction on the air interface of approximately 1.65 Mbps in the examined reference use case in contrast to the standard keep-alive mechanism.