As networks shift to 5G, there is a growing need for enhanced network visibility and monitoring. In a recent interview with The Fast Mode, Adrian Belcher, Senior Solutions Architect at Gigamon explores some of the factors pushing the need for advanced visibility and analytics as well as some of challenges operators are facing with their existing observability tools.
Tara: The need for network visibility and monitoring is much more critical in 5G compared to its predecessor networks. Why?
Adrian Belcher, Senior Solutions Architect, GigamonAdrian: The nature of the traffic traversing mobile networks, and thus the applications that represents, has and is continuing to change in fundamental characteristics. The 5G World is dominated by real-time and near-real-time applications from streaming and interactive video, gaming, AR and VR to latency sensitive machine control and safety systems, so any service impairment becomes more immediately apparent to the user and application.
This revolution is occurring at the time that the infrastructure is multiplying in complexity, involving potentially multiple vendors and platforms, with increasing automation both in Core and RAN so that at any given moment the configuration of the service platforms is not necessarily as a result of specific action by the operator of the network.
This makes effective visibility into the quality of the service as experienced by the users and applications absolutely critical, and the operator cannot rely solely on the service network marking its own homework.
Tara: Based on the findings of an operator survey conducted on 5G visibility needs, we see telecom operators rating ‘cloud-native architectures’ and ‘multi-vendor open architectures’ as the biggest factors pushing the need for enhanced visibility. What are your views on this?
Figure 1: Factors driving operator 5G network visibility and monitoring needs
Adrian: The cloud-native platforms across the 5G architecture undoubtedly multiply the complexity for operations teams running these new networks, and the nature of the platforms radically opens up the security risks, so the Service Providers are having to attempt to square the circle of implementing new security regimes without sacrificing the agility to take advantage of the self-organising nature of the infrastructure.
The parallel challenge is the observer effect - it is far from trivial to effectively monitor the performance of cloud applications without impacting the platforms you are trying to instrument. At the very least it is necessary to engineer the physical platforms with the capacity to properly support observability which can be orthogonal to the commercial driver of keeping physical infrastructure to a minimal footprint. The corollary is that this would be commercially bruising to retro-fit.
Figure 2: Factors driving operator 5G network visibility and monitoring needs (breakdown)
Tara: Are operators’ current analytics/observability frameworks and tools sufficient to support the complexities of 5G networks? What challenges do operators typically face in putting in place the required capabilities?
Adrian: 2022 is likely to turn out to be the year that the mobile Service Providers turn their attention to effective observability of the full spectrum of 5G services. The turmoil of late-stage LTE virtualisation, build-out of the first phase of 5G RANand the instantiation of the 5G SA cores will have at least run through the planning stage and so thoughts are turning to the world of 5G beyond eMBB.
It has been obvious for some time that the monitoring architectures of the 4G/LTE era are not going to evolve easily into the 5G world, if for no other reason than commercial viability - the implied cost of scaling up probing infrastructure to accommodate projected eMBB traffic volumes is not a happy-looking equation. Add in the much more distributed architecture, the implication of deploying probing at a far larger number of locations, the implied number does not diminish.
The fact that, in many markets, the service providers are not able to charge premium tariffs for eMBB services does nothing to add to the top line either.
So, the attention will start to focus on how to build out an observability framework that can encompass the changing nature of the eMBB traffic (real-time and near-real-time, primarily video-based), with what will be required for mMMTC and URLLC services in the future.
Now this is where the picture starts to brighten as there are many shared KPIs across the traffic types - eMBB undoubtedly brings the volume challenge in a way that the other two don’t, but measures around location, latency, relative packet timing and a number of others are shared. Thus, the challenge is to build the framework that can be consistently deployed across Core, RAN, MEC, FWA and all the other permutations.
So, in answer to the question, are the current frameworks and tools sufficient, the answer has to be "no". Can some existing solutions evolve to answer the challenge, the answer has to be "possibly".
The most fundamental challenge the Service Providers will face is organisational, as operational teams (and security falls into that category) will have to engage in ways that cut across historical boundaries - the "Core Team" will have to engage with the "Security Team" in way they did not have to in the 4G era. Those two will have to engage with the “ Probing and Analytics Team “ in a much more closely-coupled way.
This will entail those organisations being brave enough to step back and take a clear-eyed view as to what the world is going to look like in two years’ time, let alone three, four, five years, and realistically that means a shared framework.
It might sound like an anachronism to talk about “ tap once and distribute “, but that is what is going to be required, just applied to the hybrid world of 5G.
Tara: Why is cloud visibility a key component for 5G?
Adrian: Cloud observability is obviously a fundamental requirement for 5G Core since it is cloud native, but with VRAN and ORAN the cloud platforms migrate into areas not previously exposed to this model. The final part of the equation will be MEC, which will also be cloud-based, so a consistent framework will be essential to efficient operational agility.
Tara: What about application-awareness and subscriber-awareness? How is this important in delivering different 5G service classes and customer SLAs?
Adrian: The concepts of application-awareness and subscriber-awareness are going to have to evolve as advanced 5G services appear in the coming years.
Consider the scenario in 2025 where you are driving your “ connected “ car along a highway into an urban area. Your vehicle has built-in near-real-time telemetry for data to support the warranty and servicing programme provided by the manufacturer. You have also subscribed to a service to provide traffic information for queue-warning, road safety service and wrong-way driver warning and as you arrive at the urban destination you pick up the city grid for real-time information on parking while participating in V2P safety cooperation. You then decide to take the scenic route home where you use a wide range of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) from look-ahead to curve-speed-warning.
This opens up a whole new range of challenges compared to the 4G world of multiple applications running on smartphones. The first phase of 5G eMBB services bring the even-more-of-the-same since the RAN bandwidth and shift to video-based services stresses the application-awareness infrastructure simply because of processing capacity. Subscriber-awareness is a function available to manage that traffic volume, but consider the scenario above and the definition of the subscriber - is it the driver of the vehicle, the vehicle manufacturer providing the warranty and service programme, is it the government entity providing the city grid, or all of these?
The paradigm shift is that these mMTC and URLLC services are not typically high bandwidth and the measure of the service quality can’t be determined using the analysis of flow characteristics, a technique that has been employed to mitigate the effects of traffic volume.
The overarching challenge thus becomes building an observability framework that can deliver a range of intelligence to a spectrum of consumers, some of which will be external to the CSP providing the infrastructure, but also to the infrastructure itself as elements become self-organising such as NWDAF in the Core and RICs in the RAN.
Thus, the 5G equivalents of application-awareness and subscriber-awareness will assume an even greater significance since they will be the cues for the observability framework to apply the relevant capabilities according to the requirements of the various consumers.
Tara: Can you share with us how Gigamon Hawk, the Hybrid Cloud Visibility and Analytics Fabric helps operators achieve deep visibility into 5G networks?
Adrian: If there is a single defining characteristic of Gigamon Hawk that makes the proposition compelling, it is the full-spectrum capability. To deliver on effective observability, the approach has to be hybrid and to offer functionality that covers a wide array of service types and consumers, and only Gigamon Hawk has that vision.
Tara: How do GigaSMART® applications expand the capabilities of Gigamon Hawk?
Adrian: GigaSMART is the core hybrid capability that delivers the Gigamon Hawk vision. An effective observability framework has to be able to bring to bear a range of functions that may, at any given point in time, be instantiated in either cloud or physical environment and applied to a specific set of traffic whether that be Control Plane or User Plane. In one context that may be to address the volume challenge, but at the same time there is likely to be an overlapping requirement for the more particular functionality for mMTC and URLLC service monitoring.
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To learn more:
- Check out the white paper How to Turn the Costs of Monitoring 5G to Your Advantage and discover how to optimize monitoring costs for 5G
- Check out the white paper Accelerating 5G Deployments with Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric and find out how operators can leverage Gigamon's Visibility Analytics Fabric to accelerate their 5G deployments
- Check out the blog article Making 5G Fit for the Future: Managing the Data Deluge
