Traffic Aware Optimal Bandwidth Segmentation for Low Latency Communication in 5G

The fifth-generation (5G) mobile technology comes with numerous enhancements to support new use cases and services. Two of these enhancements are Numerology and Bandwidth Part (BWP) in the 5G NR (New Radio) standard. While Numerology gives the flexibility for selecting Transmission Time Interval (TTI) for different types of service classes, the BWP allows a gNB (5G NR Base Station) carrier to be divided into multiple parts. Different BWPs can run different Numerologies simultaneously by selecting higher Numerology for low latency use cases. In this paper, we identified the drawbacks of higher Numerology under high traffic scenario and proposed an optimal bandwidth (BW) segmentation algorithm. The proposed solution reduces the downlink latency by selecting Numerologies and BWP based on the traffic conditions of various services. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively adapt to the traffic load and reduce the delay and packet loss rate by up to 36% and 18.5%, respectively compared to static Numerology-based scheduling.