The Shifts … Recycling of OLD Telco Concepts for New Age Telco 5G Networks

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I’m amused to see how fashion changes. Old fashion comes back in vogue after few years. It’s like a cycle. I see something similar happening in Telecom networks as well.

 Initially, the Telecom Network Technology was developed to carry telephone calls, whereas the Internet and other computer networks were intended to transfer asynchronous data between computing devices. In the legacy telecom network, the core was intelligent and the devices as depicted in the diagram below were dumb.

But this architecture was imposing innovation constraints. Innovation could happen only in the intelligent core which is centralized and dependent only on the Telecom operator.

By contrast, Internet Architecture is dumb at its core and relies on intelligent edge nodes!!! And this was the reason for the proliferation of innovation around the internet. Hence telecom networks started leveraging the new concept where the core become dumb and end devices became intelligent as depicted in the diagram below:

In the Internet Architecture paradigm, the innovation happens at Smart-Device-end which is not centralized and not dependent on any central authority/entity/system. That is why we saw the emergence of OTT Players, eCommerce Players, IoT, Mobile Apps, a plethora of innovative start-ups. The telecom network went through Infrastructure Inversion from PSTN concepts of the intelligent core to 3G/4G concepts of dumb network with intelligent end devices.

 But now with the coming of 5G in near future, we witness the coming back of embedding intelligent nodes in the dumb network! It is happening to address the latency issues that constrain human and machine collaboration. The IP Network /4G solved the issue of throughput and network resilience which was demanded by applications running inside the smartphone/ devices. These applications were primary data and voice applications. Latency was not a big factor. But when you need to interconnect millions of IoT devices, the latency becomes the bottleneck with dumb IP/4G network can not resolve. The processing (compute, storage capabilities) needs to be brought nearer to the consumption endpoint device. This is what 5G is promising to resolve. Hence, in 5G we see intelligence is being embedded in the IP network as Intelligent Edge locations as depicted in the diagram below.

The blown-up of the network part of the diagram is provided below for better readability:

Cloud Service Provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) is helping the telecom operators by providing services to embed intelligence in the network, especially in the on-premise / network-edge locations to deliver a 5G network’s Edge and Core.

#     Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) capabilities are built using AWS Outposts with Services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

#    5G Core User Plane Function (UPF) is deployed on AWS Outposts on-premises to provide high throughput.

·     Use AWS Direct Connect to connect on-premises 5G Core components to an AWS Region for control and management

#    5G Core user plane function (UPF) is implemented as micro-services on Amazon EKS taking advantage of Single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV), Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), and dual-homing capabilities

#    The Control Plane runs on the AWS Region on the same virtual private cloud (VPC) as on-premises. Control plane functions are implemented on Amazon ECS or EKS.

#    Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) expansion to on-premises allows UPF instances to expand to AWS regions via Network Load Balancer (NLB) if needed.

·     Other VPCs for Telcom operator and B2B Customers can be interconnected via AWS Transit Gateway and host management and orchestration services.

#    AWS Wavelength is used to allow the developer community access to the communication service provider (CSP) environment, and to provide low latency apps to subscribers.

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