An Overview of 5G System Accessibility Control and Differentiation

5G system is characterized by its capability to support a wide range of use cases and services. Supporting accessibility differentiation becomes therefore essential to preserve a stable network condition during high traffic load, while ensuring connection and service quality to prioritized devices and services. In this article, we describe some use cases and requirements that impact the 3GPP design of the 5G accessibility differentiation framework. We then provide an overview of the supported mechanisms for accessibility control in 5G Stand Alone (SA) system, including cell barring and reservation, unified access control, paging control, random access control and admission control. We discuss how these functionalities can be used to maintain the service quality and selectively limit the incoming traffic to the network at high load situations, leveraging different connection-type indicators and connection-priority identifiers.