A Comprehensive Analysis on Network Slicing for Smart Hospital Applications

Abstract

Network slicing (NS) is technology that enables emerging smart applications and use cases in Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks. One such application is smart hospitals, which has diverse network requirements for applications ranging from Augmented Reality (AR) and robot assisted surgeries to connecting large numbers of medical wearables and sensors. NS can be performed in smart hospitals under different strategies based on dynamicity, ownership, and application. This paper investigates how these strategies can be utilized in different smart hospital applications. The performance of each slicing strategy in a hospital network is analyzed under three matrices: bandwidth utilization, handover count, and block count.