Verizon and Axon Enterprise Inc. recently conducted a demonstration in the field, which used network slicing technology on a wireless 5G network in a public-safety use case, the companies announced. The test illustrated significant benefits from using slicing.
Network slicing allows for dynamic network resource provisioning, which lets the network “dynamically support the experience customers should get for the applications they are using and efficiently provide that specific service level when resources are available,” the companies explained in a press statement.
Axon Fleet 3 is an in-car video system with live maps and live streaming from mobile cameras. Together with Axon Respond providing real-time situational awareness, these offerings are designed to provide situational intelligence to law enforcement professionals who aren’t on the scene but need to know certain information.
In the demonstration, video data was passed over a network slice in a live commercial 5G environment in Phoenix through Axon Fleet 3 and Axon Respond services.
The demonstration featured Axon running side-by-side tests of its two offerings. One video feed was run over a network slice on Verizon’s commercial 5G Ultra Wideband network and 5G Standalone core. The other test was run simultaneously over Verizon’s commercial 5G Ultra Wideband network without network slicing.
Performance was measured across four categories. The results were:
- 53% improvement in 95th percentile of time to first frame,
- 5% improvement in start percent,
- 68% improvement in latency, and
- 83% improvement in jitter.
“This most recent network slicing demonstration shows one of many use cases where network slicing can be a game-changer for our enterprise, public sector, and Verizon Frontline customers,” Adam Koeppe, Verizon senior vice president of network and technology planning, said in a prepared statement.
“We have undergone a massive transformation of our network over the past few years, including building on a cloud-native architecture, virtualizing from the core to the edge, building an advanced 5G standalone core, driving capacity in our fiber core, adding robust and varied spectrum assets, and infusing intelligence throughout the network. These changes allow us to develop and test this new technology that effectively matches the required network resources with the performance characteristics needed for an app or use case to work effectively,” Koeppe said.
Verizon has been doing quite a lot of development work, testing and demonstrations involving network slicing technology.
T-Mobile also has been working on network slicing.
