Present-day Verticals and Where to Find Them: A Data-driven Study on the Transition to 5G

Much of the research about 5G networks deals with emerging or upcoming applications, e.g., self-driving cars and virtual reality. In this paper, we focus on present-day Internet services and assess which of them can benefit the most integration within 5G, i.e., which of today's service providers are the most likely to become 5G verticals. To this end, we leverage a large-scale, real-world, crowd-sourced dataset representing the data required by thousands of smartphone apps, and study the data rate and sparseness associated with each app. We argue that high-data rate, low-sparseness apps have the most to gain from 5G integration, and find that this category includes not only video streaming, but also peer-to-peer file transfer and mobile gaming applications.