Performance Analysis of 5G RAN Slicing Deployment Options in Industry 4.0 Factories

Abstract: This paper studies Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing strategies for 5G Industry~4.0 networks with ultra-reliable low-latency communication (uRLLC) requirements. We comparatively analyze four RAN slicing deployment options that differ in slice sharing and per-line or per-flow isolation. Unlike prior works that focus on management architectures or resource allocation under a fixed slicing structure, this work addresses the design of RAN slicing deployment options in the presence of multiple production lines and heterogeneous industrial flows. An SNC-based analytical framework and a heuristic slice planner are used to evaluate these options in terms of per-flow delay guarantees and radio resource utilization. Results show that under resource scarcity only per-flow slicing prevents delay violations by tightly matching resources to per-flow delay targets, while slice-sharing and hybrid deployments improve aggregation efficiency at the cost of weaker protection for the most delay-critical flows. Execution-time results confirm that the planner operates at Non-RT time scales, enabling its integration within O-RAN Non-RT RIC loops.