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Are You Ready to Serve Thousands of Network Slices to Your Customers?

Are You Ready to Serve Thousands of Network Slices to Your Customers? Image Credit: TierneyMJ/Bigstockphoto.com

5G will radically change the mobile network experience over the coming years. We’re not only talking about faster 4G with bigger data pipes. We’re talking about mobile services that permeate every aspect of life: driving, medicine, manufacturing, education, entertainment, town management, home management - the list goes on.

Telco operators are, not surprisingly, very excited about 5G because each of those new services is a potential source of new revenue. However, they’re also a little cautious because 5G has the potential to completely upend business as usual. Everything from the way networks are archi-tected to the way that services are created, managed and monetized will change with 5G. That’s a scary thought for many legacy network vendors as well.

Phased approach to 5G transformation

Many operators have started their 5G transformation journey by investing in additional RAN capacity and early virtualization initiatives. It’s a necessary step, to be sure, and a comfortable one for telcos that are used to evolving by accretion (i.e., adding hardware to handle growth).

The second phase of 5G transformation is new terrain for most telcos: creating a cloud native network core that can scale efficiently. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft (with their move into the 5G core) have done a lot of work already, popularizing concepts such as containers, microservices, edge computing and automation. With 5G, operators will adopt these same web scale architectural principles.

The final phase of 5G transformation will take telcos across the relatively undiscovered land of network slicing. The concept of network slicing involves the creation of many network experiences based on very granular, and sometimes very dynamic criteria, with the aim of delivering an agreed SLA in the most efficient manner.

For example, a telco may have a large and static slice of their network dedicated to residential broadband services and other slices with various levels of security/SLA to support remote workers for different organizations. They may also have a multitude of dynamic slices that are quickly spun up for live events: music concerts, sports games, business conferences, etc. There could be dozens of industry-specific vertical slices for remote manufacturing, telemedicine, municipal services and airlines, to name a few. And, finally, there will be horizontal slices that cut across different industries, such as virtual reality experiences and automated vehicles, which require the same security/SLA regardless of the vertical.

5G network slicing complexity

Network slicing isn’t as simple as just assigning different policies to different pipes, like an enterprise SIP trunk. Advanced zero-touch automation techniques (being standardized by the SA5 group of 3GPP for release 16 and 17) will be required to orchestrate the creation of network slices and ensure that the SLAs agreed with the slice owner (the end customer) are satisfied using Closed Loop Assurance techniques. This complexity is heightened by the fact that even a single, simple slice has multiple touchpoints in a 5G network. There is the Session Management Function (SMF), Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF), Policy Control Function (PCF), User Plane Function (UPF), Network Slice Selection Function (NSSF), and Network Slice Management Function (NSMF), amongst others.

The unique challenges of network slicing in a 5G environment are readily evident when you look at charging systems. Converged Charging Systems that operate well in a standard 4G environment fall short when 5G and network slicing enters the picture. Suddenly, the scale of traffic, the multitude of network/management touchpoints to understand the real-time delivery characteristics of the service flows and the requirements of latency-sensitive 5G services such as telemedicine and self-driving vehicles place an enormous strain on charging systems that were built for a very different set of well-defined circumstances.

Interoperability becomes another important factor, as these sliced services find themselves operating in a multi-vendor and multi-vertical environment, while being deployed in a cloud native agile business environment where operator business requirements must be satisfied in real time.

The essential role of the CCS

5G requires a charging platform that can adapt to a multitude of business models/requirements through real-time configuration, requiring the business agility demanded by operators moving to a web scale environment. These are considerations that most legacy charging systems are still coming to grips with.

In order to fulfill these requirements, it is essential that cloud native principles are adhered to. At the same time, the Converged Charging System must also use underlying technology that allows the surge of charging transactions to be handled in a predictable fashion, offering ultra-low latency at the extremely high transaction volumes that will become the signature of a 5G environment.

Lastly, the CCS must provide the operational agility to allow edge deployments, in order to further reduce the latency budget for specific use cases such as SNPN and centralized core deployment models suited to the needs of specific telcos.

Author

As a Director of Product Management and member of the MATRIXX 3GPP standards specifications team, Rob Edwards guides the network aspects of the MATRIXX Software 5G product roadmap.

With over 25 years of technical leadership experience in the telecom and software industry, Rob’s depth of knowledge is unparalleled. Rob has held senior positions at telecom companies, including Nortel/BNR, Alcatel, Oracle and Ericsson spanning software engineering/architect, consultancy and presales positions. Rob first began his career at Bell Northern Research, applying distributed computing technologies into telecoms delivery/management platforms.

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