Impact of Slice Function Placement on the Performance of URLLC with Redundant Coverage

Network slicing has emerged as a promising technical solution to ensure the coexistence of the various 5G services. While the evolution of the 5G architecture for supporting slicing has been thoroughly studied, the impact of the architectural options on RAN resource allocation efficiency is still unclear. This article fills a gap in this area by assessing the impact of architecture choices on the quality of service of different services, with a focus on ultra-reliable low-latency communication applications. We propose architectural options based on the placement of the entities responsible for implementing these functions. We then assess their impact on the radio resource allocation flexibility when slices span two radio access technologies with redundant coverage. Our numerical experiments show that the placement of the slice management functions plays a crucial role in the choice of the radio resource allocation scheme that best fits URLLC slices.