Towards a Software-Defined, Fine-Grained QoS Framework for 5G and Beyond Networks

5G offers a slew of new features and capabilities to support a whole gamut of new applications. On the other hand, 5G new radio (NR), especially, high-band mmWave radio, also poses new challenges, as shown by recent measurement studies of commercial 5G services. In order to effectively support new classes of application such as extra low-latency and/or high-bandwidth applications, we argue that truly cross-layer network-application integration that exposes application semantics to enable 5G and beyond 5G (B5G) networks to make intelligent decisions, e.g., for dynamic radio resource allocation, is needed. Unfortunately the existing 5G flow-based framework is inadequate to support such cross-layer integration. We therefore advocate a software-defined, fine-grained QoS framework. We use ultra-high resolution (UHR) volumetric video streaming as a use case and conduct very preliminary experiments to demonstrate the potential benefits of the proposed framework. This position paper serves as a strawman to call for new intelligent architectural designs for B5G networks and next-generation wireless systems.