5G Infrastructure Network Slicing: E2E Mean Delay Model and Effectiveness Assessment to Reduce Downtimes in Industry 4.0 Chinchilla Romero, Lorena Prados Garzón, Jonathan Ameigeiras Gutiérrez, Pablo José Muñoz Luengo, Pablo López Soler, Juan Manuel Infrastructure slicing Network slicing Private networks 5G Delay Response time Isolation This work has been partially funded by the H2020 project 5G-CLARITY (Grant No. 871428) and the Spanish national project TRUE-5G (PID2019-108713RB-C53). Fifth Generation (5G) is expected to meet stringent performance network requisites of the Industry 4.0. Moreover, its built-in network slicing capabilities allow for the support of the traffic heterogeneity in Industry 4.0 over the same physical network infrastructure. However, 5G network slicing capabilities might not be enough in terms of degree of isolation for many private 5G networks use cases, such as multi-tenancy in Industry 4.0. In this vein, infrastructure network slicing, which refers to the use of dedicated and well isolated resources for each network slice at every network domain, fits the necessities of those use cases. In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of infrastructure slicing to provide isolation among production lines (PLs) in an industrial private 5G network. To that end, we develop a queuing theory-based model to estimate the end-to-end (E2E) mean packet delay of the infrastructure slices. Then, we use this model to compare the E2E mean delay for two configurations, i.e., dedicated infrastructure slices with segregated resources for each PL against the use of a single shared infrastructure slice to serve the performance-sensitive traffic from PLs. Also we evaluate the use of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) against bare Ethernet to provide layer 2 connectivity among the 5G system components. We use a complete and realistic setup based on experimental and simulation data of the scenario considered. Our results support the effectiveness of infrastructure slicing to provide isolation in performance among the different slices. Then, using dedicated slices with segregated resources for each PL might reduce the number of the production downtimes and associated costs as the malfunctioning of a PL will not affect the network performance perceived by the performance-sensitive traffic from other PLs. Last, our results show that, besides the improvement in performance, TSN technology truly provides full isolation in the transport network compared to standard Ethernet thanks to traffic prioritization, traffic regulation, and bandwidth reservation capabilities. 2022-02-09T09:29:05Z 2022-02-09T09:29:05Z 2021-12-29 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Chinchilla-Romero, L... [et al.]. 5G Infrastructure Network Slicing: E2E Mean Delay Model and Effectiveness Assessment to Reduce Downtimes in Industry 4.0. Sensors 2022, 22, 229. [https://doi.org/10.3390/s22010229] http://hdl.handle.net/10481/72735 10.3390/s22010229 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/871428 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España MDPI