Enabling Delay-Sensitive IoT Application by Programmable Local 5G Edge

IoT services collect sensor and multimedia data from edge devices for capturing the status of the physical world. Delay-sensitive traffic, especially for monitoring and controlling the edge devices, should be transferred and processed in a priority manner even if congestion in the network occurs because of the system resource sharing with data-intensive and delay-tolerant traffic. A local 5G system is promising for achieving delay-sensitive IoT services because it enables the local 5G operator to control the programmable local 5G system and service level by themselves. But it isn’t easy to install novel congestion control protocols to the non-programmable system components other than the local 5G system, such as proprietary IoT devices and wide-area networks operated by network carriers. Our contribution is three-fold: First, we propose a traffic control method for delay-sensitive IoT services installed only in 5G UPF or edge routers in DN without modifying IoT devices or controlling the wide-area network. It controls the latency of delay-sensitive traffic by classifying the delay-sensitive and delay-tolerant traffic, adding delays to, and modifying the receive window size in the packets of the delay-tolerant traffic. Second, we propose an implementation architecture for the programmable Whitebox switches utilizing BPF/XDP functionality. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method. The evaluation result shows that our proposed method keeps the latency of delay-sensitive traffic within the required latency for single and multiple Local 5G locations that share the obscure wide-area network.