Benchmarking and Profiling 5G Verticals' Applications: An Industrial IoT Use Case

The Industry 4.0 sector is evolving in a tremendous pace by introducing a set of industrial automation mechanisms tightly coupled with the exploitation of Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. By combining such emerging technologies, interconnected sensors, instruments, and other industrial devices are networked together with industrial applications, formulating the Industrial IoT (IIoT) and aiming to improve the efficiency and reliability of the deployed applications and provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. However, in a 5G era, efficient, reliable and highly performant applications' provision has to be combined with exploitation of capabilities offered by 5G networks. Optimal usage of the available resources has to be realised, while guaranteeing strict QoS requirements such as high data rates, ultra-low latency and jitter. The first step towards this direction is based on the accurate profiling of vertical industries' applications in terms of resources usage, capacity limits and reliability characteristics. To achieve so, in this paper we provide an integrated methodology and approach for benchmarking and profiling 5G vertical industries' applications. This approach covers the realisation of benchmarking experiments and the extraction of insights based on the analysis of the collected data. Such insights are considered the cornerstones for the development of AI models that can lead to optimal infrastructure usage along with assurance of high QoS provision. The detailed approach is applied in a real IIoT use case, leading to profiling of a set of 5G network functions.