Let's try to understand flexible slot-based framework to certain extent. Now as I mentioned, the operational details and technicalities are somewhat beyond us. For each of these five features, what I'll try to do is just give you a high level of technical essence of what that concept is and then we will try to help you understand those concepts in terms of every day and easier to understand analogies. A flexible slot-based framework, as the name might suggest to some of you, is about making timelines a little flexible. What do I mean by that at a high level? Well, the timelines of operation in legacy technologies, be it LTE or Wi-Fi, are somewhat rigid. For example, if a certain phone needs two seconds to accomplish a certain task, the network will assign the UE enough resources, for example, frequency spectrum for those two seconds. Now, if the UE requires those two seconds, that is okay. But what if the UE is faster than expected and it completes the task in just one second instead of two seconds? Then in legacy technologies, in most cases, at least the resources corresponding to the remaining one second would be wasted because the UE has already completed its task. But that is where 5G makes all our operation more efficient in that not only does 5G allocate a given UE the precise amount of resources that will be needed to accomplish the task at hand. But if somebody sources are leftover in terms of time or frequency, the 5G network is smart enough to allocate the remaining resources at runtime to other users so that those resources will not be wasted and because they'll be utilized by other users, the overall network performance will be better than before. Flexible slot-based framework at a high level is about carefully utilizing your resources and making certain changes at runtime in order to significantly improve your operational efficiency. How can we understand this technical concept in terms of everyday easier to understand analogy in terms of, let's say, our transportation and cars? Well, to understand that, understand how our roads are constructed today. You have a road with a fixed width and all the lanes on the roads have fixed and equal width, which is okay if your car is broad enough to require the entirely. But as we know, most cars today are narrower than the actual lane width and some of the space in that lane on either side of the car is pretty much wasted. Furthermore, if it has an arrow motorbike that we are talking about, it definitely doesn't need the entirely. At such, some of the space in the lane is wasted, so to speak. All that happens because the lane markers in current design are pretty much static. But imagine a hypothetical road wherein you could move the lane markers dynamically precisely depending upon the type and intensity of the oncoming traffic. If you have the ability to dynamically but carefully move the lane markers to adapt to oncoming traffic how would that look like? Imagine a road that has fixed width, but lane size is variable. For example, for a wider truck, you can have a wider lane, whereas for narrow or motorbikes, you can have narrower lanes, for emergency traffic you can have a dedicated lane, and for future traffic you can carve out lanes as may be required by that future traffic. The fundamental premise here is that instead of having those lane markers fixed, which are okay for some vehicles, but may be inefficient for a wide majority of other vehicles. But thus, not only that for emergency vehicles as we saw in this example, in the conventional model, they have to use the exact same lanes as other vehicles and that may not be desirable with respect to the urgency of their objectives. Having a dedicated lane carved out for emergency vehicles at runtime will definitely help them meet their objectives faster and that can be very conducive to someone's health or safety. That is where such an imaginary construct where in-the-lane markers on the road can shift dynamically to offer lane widths that are precisely suitable to the requirements of the oncoming traffic would be immensely valuable without increasing the width of the road. Keep in mind, we did not widen the road itself, but we simply move the lane markers on the existing road at runtime so that within the realm of existing resources we could carefully and efficiently allocate resources to different vehicles precisely according to their runtime requirements and that is an equivalent of what 5G does in network parlance. In that, flexible slot-based framework is about carefully allocating the resources to different UEs and their applications depending upon their real-time requirement and that helps us avoid unnecessary wastage of resources. In that terms, flexible slot-based framework is equivalent to flexible road framework, wherein lane markers can shift dynamically, and that ultimately allows us to efficiently adapt to all traffic types and situations within the existing amount of resources we have without using any additional resources.
