Definition and Evaluation of Latency in 5G: A Framework Approach

Latency as a key performance indicator (KPI) of 5G communication has attracted a significant amount of efforts from both industry and academia to provide the enhanced technology solution to meet the requirement of low latency from the diverse 5G use cases. With the evolution of technologies and eco-system in 5G, it becomes not only more important but also more challenging to manage a large number of elements which have been connected and orchestrated to provide an end-to-end communication service across different segments of the network. This paper introduces a framework approach to define and evaluate latency in 5G based on the proposed 5G systems from four research projects. The use case and architecture are well studied to identify and analyse the contribution of latency. The proposed reference framework of latency is validated by mapping it to the testbed of these projects.

I. Introduction

This paper is a joint work among four 5G-PPP Phase 2 projects, namely, NGPaaS [1], 5GCity [2], 5G ESSENSE [3] and MATILDA [4]. The motivation of this join work is driven by the significant diversity in both use cases and technologies of 5G. In order to meet the requirements from different vertical use cases, the 5G deployment shows high heterogeneity in virtualisation technologies, platform and workload deployment etc., which range from the physical infrastructure to the upper-layer services tailored to the vertical services. Thus, the collaboration among multiple projects could be precious to capture and cope with different views from these projects. The goal of this joint work is to provide a methodology to define and evaluate the latency as a KPI of 5G communication under different scenarios and technical solutions.