CLASP: a 999-style Priority Lanes Framework for 5G-era Critical Data Services

Society is increasingly reliant on digital services for its proper functioning. Yet, going into the 5G era, the prevailing paradigm for data treats all traffic as equal regardless of how critical they are to the proper functioning of society. We argue that this is a suboptimal scenario and that services such as driverless cars and road/rail traffic updates are too important for society to be treated the same way as entertainment services. Our contribution in this paper is to propose the CLASP (Critical, Localized, Authorized, Specific, Perishable) framework to guide regulators and policymakers in deciding and managing 999-style priority lanes for critical data services during atypical scenarios in the 5G era. Our evaluation shows that reserving a 100kbps ‘lane’ for CLASP-prioritised traffic for all users does not lead to an overall statistically significant deterioration in atypical scenarios.