Analysis of Strategies for Minimising End-to-End Latency in 5G Networks

The main purpose of this paper is to identify and study a variety of strategies that effectively reduce the end-to-end latency in both 4G and 5G networks. This latency reduction will allow operators to provide URLLC services to users, such as: remote surgeries, Intelligent Transport Systems and factory automation services. To verify if those services can be implemented using 4G and 5G systems, the developed model considers several variables: the MEC node deployment option, the functionality splitting options, the radio techniques and the network architectures. The MEC technology appears in the paper as the solution that allows the end-to-end latency values to reach values below 1 ms, which are required for some of the URLLC services. The results obtained show that the 4G system does not have enough capacity to allow the existence of the upcoming services. Even with the MEC node deployment that minimises the latency, the LTE network is not able to provide the URLLC services under study. The simulations show that using the adequate latency reduction strategies and radio techniques, the 5G system has enough capacity and sufficiently low latencies to provide the upcoming services.