Virtualization- 'Real' need in 5G networks and IoT

C-RAN (Cloud or Centralized RAN), while proven technically, will see a lag in deployments in North America and Europe. We will see some selective deployments in Japan, China, and Korea.

5G Onset and IoT Explosion - While mobile operators in U.S. are starting to embrace “pre-standard” 5G, vying for the first mover’s advantage, the standards are not expected until 2018. This is almost a deja vuof what happened in early days of 3G in the beginning of this millennium – proprietary implementations got standardized later. With operators in U.S. announcing their plans to deploy 5G this year and some of the early adopters in Korea, Japan, and China ready to roll, some of the concepts are being solidified fast.

Let’s see how the drive behind 5G and wide range of Internet of Things requires virtualization.

• According to Gartner, there will be 20+ Billion connected devices by 2020. These Internet of Things (IoT) devices will range from those that send Gbps of data to those that send a few bits every month.

• Low latency for some mission critical devices such as “connected, driverless cars” will dictate key LTE Base Station functions being distributed – some will move closer to the edge and rest will be “pooled” in the cloud.

• Verticals requiring different type of services from the network – some high bandwidth, some low power, some very low latency, some high availability.

5G, sometimes is narrowly classified as a higher bandwidth radio access technology. It is much more than that. It will also be the network for low power devices/ sensors that are classified under Internet of Things and, low latency applications.

In order to support such varying 5G use cases across multiple verticals, operators need to shift from being network centric to being more service oriented.

To understand this shift, examining the concept of “network slicing” is crucial.

Let us consider use cases such as mobile broadband with higher bandwidth video requiring high availability everywhere, or low power sensors that can operate on a pair of AA batteries for 10 years, or connected/ driverless cars that can zip through crowded streets in Los Angeles or Seoul but brake within microseconds when they sense potential obstructions in their paths. Each of these requires a different configuration of the requirements and parameters in the network. In essence, they will need their own Network Slice.

Therefore, networks will need to be built such that speed, availability, capacity and coverage can all be allocated in logical slices to meet the specific demands of these use cases.

In essence, the best way to implement these network slices would be virtualization—forusing Service Provider SDN, NFV and network orchestration. In each of these use cases, the SDN Controller will configure and build the network slices that include service chains such as DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), emails, security scans per user, or per service. The network services themselves are virtualized as VNFs that allows operators to set up services rapidly, and scale them in response to network/service demands.

All of these vEPC functions, which are being delivered today, will scale and translate directly into the integrated 5G networks. The C-RAN will eventually be deployed where it is commercially feasible. It is not necessary to have the C-RAN deployed day 1 in 5G networks although the benefits and technical feasibility are well understood.

As 5G networks begins its strong march towards deployment worldwide, the wide array of use cases ranging from support for the ever increasing bandwidth demands to the diverse IoT low power/high availability devices will require virtualization to be in the forefront of this revolution.