Don’t let “soft power” hinder development in the 5G era

The arrival of 5G not only makes the Internet of Everything a reality, but also adds new value to many application scenarios. However, the upgrades brought about by 5G are not limited to the hardware level. If the soft power of the enterprise network cannot keep up, it will also offset the improvement in network throughput it brings.

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Each generation of wireless communication technology has brought an important breakthrough. 2G is about digital communication. 3G brought smartphones, which can not only make calls but also obtain various forms of data. 4G can further obtain advanced data from mobile phones and then participate in videos (and other scenarios). The advanced part of 5G is that it can connect everything. The killer application of 5G is not about speed, but about latency.

High bandwidth, low latency, and large capacity are the main features of the 5G era, and virtualization has also penetrated into areas such as firewalls, EPCs, and routers. Telecom operators and corporate CIOs are all exploring how to combine networks more effectively in different environments. The key lies not only in flexibility and economic benefits, but also in the impact of virtualization on enterprise network applications.

Whether it is application deployment, internal and external LAN or WAN performance and elasticity, the coordination of software and hardware is becoming more and more important. For example, telecom companies can use SD-WAN to automatically redirect different types of traffic to the corresponding links, and dynamically adjust the allocation of network resources, such as focusing on the realization of the Internet of Things. Telecom operators such as Verizon and AT&T have cooperated with manufacturers such as VMware and Cisco around the combination of 5G and SD-WAN.

Since the birth of SD-WAN, acceleration has been listed as its main technical advantage. The backbone network nodes and terminal side composed of operator dedicated lines can allocate priority loading application identification and optimization. The evolved technology has begun to place software and hardware optimization in an important position, such as cloud deployment of network nodes, and the combination of intelligent routing, virtualization technology and multi-links, thereby forming a dual-active and highly available resource pool.

For SD-WAN, it can be seamlessly connected with the WAN architecture through software compatibility, and can provide better wireless technology support for WAN service configuration in a software-defined infrastructure manner to meet users' requirements for different service qualities QoS and support for remote branches.

The infrastructure of the 5G era can be reflected in its network slicing technology to ensure priority transmission scheduling functions, and SDN and NFV can also be used to solve the coupling problem of EPC. In addition to the SDN mentioned above, by decoupling the upper-layer applications from the hardware, the resource call rate derived from the virtualization of the hardware devices can be shortened from several days to several minutes. Specifically in the telecommunications network environment, the original network elements deployed based on the private platform are closed black boxes, and the hardware resources cannot communicate with each other. If you want to expand the capacity, you can only add hardware, which can easily cause idleness in the future. In contrast, NFV can virtualize network elements into independent applications, and dynamic and flexible deployment increases network elasticity.

In addition, the services provided by VNF at the infrastructure layer are the main operational goals of NFV, which means that the former determines the prospects of network virtualization. In the cloud computing era, network function upgrades are implemented by software, with low dependence on hardware, and new technologies such as microservices, containers, and DevOps should be enabled by VNF. Considering that VNF's requirements for infrastructure are much higher than traditional IT platforms, it is crucial to elevate its features to the cloud level. Pure software is meaningless. By building cloud-based native VNFs, the original limitations will be broken and its own expansion and adaptability will be enhanced.

As a key technology towards 5G, the maturity of NFV will undoubtedly be affected by VNF. In the era of software-driven hardware, injecting cloud genes into VNF will bring new momentum to network virtualization, which is inseparable from the cooperation between developers and the open attitude of operators.

The arrival of 5G makes the combination of software and hardware more and more necessary. If the software link is missing, the development of 5G will undoubtedly be restricted.