Assessment of 5G RAN Features for Integrated Services Provisioning in Smart Cities

In a 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), different features are offered as solutions to serve traffic with diverse characteristics and requirements, including flexible numerology, (non-)pre-emptive mini-slot based scheduling and network slicing. In this paper, we present an extensive simulation-based assessment of the relative merit of these distinct 5G features in the context of a smart city environment. We further derive the optimal feature combination and associated configuration which best handles the services related to the smart city environment given their performance requirements. The obtained insights confirm the commonly argued potential of slicing, emphasizing that the optimal configuration of the slice-specific numerology depends not only on the nature of the handled services but also on the selected RAN features. Among these features, non-preemptive mini-slot based scheduling and idle resource sharing reveal significant performance potential.