Nokia this week announced the 5G MoNArch (5G Mobile Network Architecture) research project, consisting of 14 leading industrial and academic partners to focus on the implementation of a set of 5G use cases in real-world testbeds.
The project will be supported and financed as part of Phase II of the 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) by the EU.
5G MoNArch's specific goal is to use network slicing, which capitalizes on the capabilities of SDN, NFV, orchestration, and analytics, to support a variety of use cases in vertical industries such as automotive, healthcare, and media.
Network slicing is a technique where the network is logically (not physically) sectorized, so that separate services are supported by each "separate" logical network. As 5G networks need to simultaneously support various services with different requirements, network slicing will be a crucial aspect of the network architecture, providing flexible and adaptive networks which fulfill the 5G requirements, said Nokia.
In continuation of the 5G-PPP Phase 1 project 5G-NORMA, 5G-MoNArch enriches the original architectural concepts of the first phase with innovations such as cloud-enabled network protocols, and showcases the new technology in two testbeds. The flexible and programmable architecture will support the vast variety of services, use cases, and applications that 5G will bring in the next years.
Peter Merc, Head of End-to-End Mobile Networks Solutions, Nokia Bell Labs
5G PPP brings together a range of stakeholders from the communications technology sector and other industries. We follow a shared architecture of what the next-generation communications infrastructure needs to look like to enable and meet the network demands of the next decade.
