FEATURE: 5G
interconnect thousands of devices
through the Internet of Things,
a straight forward calculation
indicates that any fixed capacity
roll out to support the Internet
of Things will never become
commercially viable or even
feasible. The key to the solution is
that devices and other connected
devices need access sporadically
and not continuously. A software
defined, intelligent and virtual
network, hosted in the cloud is
a technological solution to the
enormous network capacity required
on-demand in 5G networks.
Similar to many other digital
transformation projects,
communication service providers are
finding that their legacy networks
will need to be transformed and
disrupted to pave the way for the
5G network era. The skill sets of
the networking and operational
teams within communication
service providers will also need
to broadened. These efforts
to adopt a software defined,
virtualised network, and cloud
native hosted applications, are
not just a technology exercise but
require a change of business and
organisation structure.
VMware’s Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice
President of Products and Solutions,
Telco NFV, elaborates. “Telecom
operators are transforming rapidly
as they deploy network function
High
frequencies and
the available
bandwidth
provide the
ability to offer
hyper-local
services
www.intelligentcio.com
virtualisation with the goal of
achieving a software defined
architecture that empowers them
with the capabilities and flexibility
to compete in a highly-connected
future. Operators recognise that this
transformation, which will see them
become on-demand service providers
rather than commodity bandwidth
vendors, is not a simple technology
refresh, instead it requires business-
wide transformation.”
In the Internet of Things, operators
will not able to achieve economies
of scale that are needed without
the capabilities of a software
defined environment.
IoT devices often need
to communicate only
sporadically so providing
continuous capacity is
unnecessary. In a traditional
architecture, capacity would
be fixed and possibly over-
provisioned to ensure quality
of experience.
With IoT forecasted to
generate billions of device
connections, such fixed
provisioning of capacity is cost-
prohibitive. Operators will need
to deploy network function
virtualisations to enable
them to provision capacity
and connectivity on demand
and in real-time. They are
increasingly recognising that a
fully automated environment
is a pre-requisite for delivering
a software defined service
platform supporting flexible
allocation of capacity.
The absence of physical devices
with defined capacity means that
the network is always dynamic.
Therefore, capacity availability must
be tracked and managed, utilising
insights generated from analytics.
The whole point of virtualisation
is to put a common infrastructure
in place where capacity, can be
allocated to services as required. By
managing capacity demand in a
dynamic way, sufficient capacity can
be made available for new services
delivering operational agility not
possible using the legacy approach
of communication service providers.
This analytics-enabled,
Gabriele Di Piazza, Vice President of
Products and Solutions, Telco NFV,
VMware.
A software defined operation is
also fundamental to the successful
deployment of 5G networks because
the mixture of technologies involved
in 5G will require flexibility and the
ability to be dynamic, spinning up
network function virtualisation as
and where required before turning
them off when demand stops.
Automation is vital to handle the
scale and frequency of changes.
automated, software-defined
environment presents a
substantial organisational shift for
communication service providers.
Their network engineers are experts
at managing specific network
hardware. All the intelligence
lies in the software so network
engineers will need to learn new
software skills to augment their
domain knowledge. “Such domain
knowledge is still necessary but it
needs to be expressed in software-
INTELLIGENTCIO
45