Cloudified 5G and Network Slicing
For those of you who have been in the telecom industry long enough, you may have already known wireless 2G, 3G and 4G(LTE) technologies have been mostly focusing on speed so a user can have a good experience in using the cell phone to browse the Internet, i.e data services. In 5G, it will encompass 3 pillars: speed, latency and capacity. 5G-enabled devices will be faster, have little lag and transmit a lot of data. The driving force behind all this is a wide variety of Consumer and Enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) use cases such as connected cars, smart home, smart factory, smart cities etc. that need fast speed, low latency and large capacity.
To excel on the 3 pillars, 5G has made a significant improvement: 5G Core Network is completely "cloudified" with a Service-Based Architecture (SBA) borrowed from the modern IT world. This is the big difference between 4G(LTE) and 5G! Cloudified 5G allows Network Function Virtualization (NFV) which replaces traditional Network Elements (firewalls, load balancers, routers etc.) with software components. As a result, 5G will bring about all the benefits of cloud that the IT world is enjoying to the wireless network area:
- Faster deployment and faster revenue: wireless carriers can deploy new services in the 5G cloud environment more quickly and generate revenue faster. For example, a network enhancement deployment project that took 2 weeks in the 4G days would be completed within 2 minutes!
- Auto scaling and operation efficiency: 5G core network elements can be scaled up or down to handle the traffic volume increase or decrease achieving operation efficiency.
In addition, the most important benefit of the cloudified 5G network is Network Slicing, a technology that "slices" the network for diverse IoT use cases with various needs for bandwidth, speed, SLA etc. For instance, a wireless carrier can allocate a bigger virtual "pipe", i.e.network slice, for the high bandwidth and low latency connected car IoT use cases and a smaller virtual pipe for the low bandwidth utility metering IoT use cases. Network Slicing will enable mobile carriers to maximize the return on investment via efficient use of network resources and provide differentiated services at scale.
In summary, 5G is a cloudified network and it will bring all the cloud benefits to wireless carriers and their customers, opening up new business opportunities in the next big thing - IoT!