How will the network be reconstructed in the 5G era?

The 5G era is approaching. While people are full of expectations for rich applications, they are also paying more attention to the development of 5G technology. What new requirements will 5G put forward for network architecture? What kind of technological innovation is in line with the direction of 5G evolution? How will operators fully embrace 5G? At the "Network Reconstruction and 5G Technology Seminar Salon" held recently, guests from all walks of life in the industry exchanged ideas on these key issues of concern to the industry and discussed 5G network reconstruction.

5G, a revolutionary change begins

"In the 5G era, the network architecture will undergo a revolutionary change." Yang Hongmei from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology put forward this view. She believes that in the 5G era, the Internet of Things and mobile communication network services will be integrated, giving rise to three typical applications including enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). The characteristics of these three types of services are very different from traditional telecommunications services, so 5G must undergo changes and innovations in wireless technology and core network technology, introducing technologies such as large-scale antennas, ultra-dense networking, new multiple access, and full spectrum access.

Compared with 2G, 3G, and 4G networks, the biggest change in 5G network architecture is that it is more flat. At the same time, 5G also requires a particularly flexible network architecture to achieve on-demand resource allocation. Yang Hongmei said that 5G's technological innovation has two major directions: one is to support strict communication indicators, such as experience rate, end-to-end latency, etc., and a flexible network architecture is required at the access network level to support multiple access technologies; on the other hand, 5G also needs to innovate in the intelligent control of wireless resources, edge computing, functional reconstruction, control forwarding/separation, etc.

Security is an issue that needs to be considered when reconstructing the 5G network architecture. Yang Hongmei believes that previous network construction experience has proved that security issues should be taken into consideration at the beginning of network design. For 5G networks, the significance of security is even more prominent due to the introduction of more new services and new terminal forms.

The large number of differentiated business scenarios spawned by 5G, the introduction of technologies such as SDN/NFV, innovations in business models, and the access of a large number of IoT devices to the operator's network all mean that 5G will place higher requirements on security. Specifically, the security mechanisms adopted by various access technologies are different. In order to improve the user service experience and improve the efficiency of authentication, a unified authentication architecture should be considered when designing the 5G network architecture. At the same time, since a large number of low-cost IoT devices are connected to the network, how to meet the security and privacy protection requirements of these devices is also a key consideration. In addition, the 5G era will generate a large number of industry applications, and operators will further open up network capabilities, which will result in user personal information, user service information, etc. being exposed in relatively open network nodes. If there is no enhanced privacy protection technology, it is very likely that malicious attackers will use technologies such as big data analysis to obtain user privacy, posing a threat to user information security.

Yang Hongmei believes that considering various factors, 5G networks need to have several major security capabilities: 1. Form a unified authentication architecture; 2. Multi-level slice security; 3. On-demand security protection; 4. Diverse security authentication management systems; 5. Open network security capabilities; 6. Flexible privacy protection mechanisms.

How do operators promote the reconstruction of 5G network architecture? "Different operators need to formulate corresponding evolution strategies based on the current status of their own networks." In Yang Hongmei's view, when deploying a new network, how to achieve the integration of the new network and the existing network, how to maximize the role of the existing network, so as to protect the operator's existing investment and meet new business needs are key issues. Therefore, there may be a variety of different transitional network deployment solutions for 5G.

It is worth mentioning that in the 5G era, operators must also accelerate the promotion of optimized operations. With the implementation of new businesses in some vertical industries, operators need to make some innovations and adjustments in both business models and operating models to adapt to new demands. Yang Hongmei suggested that operators can optimize operations for 5G from several aspects, such as refined management, differentiated services, and open capabilities.

SDN/NFV, laying the foundation for 5G networks

Facing the upcoming 5G era, telecom operators are stepping up their efforts to restructure their networks, and the large-scale deployment of SDN/NFV technologies will lay a solid foundation for the reconstruction of 5G network architecture.

"Applications in the 5G era will become key network applications for NFV." Cai Hui of China Mobile believes that the current NFV industry has taken shape, which will undoubtedly provide strong support for the implementation of future 5G applications. In the future, the service-oriented architecture design in the 5G era, the realization of functions and features such as network slicing and edge computing, etc., will all need to be based on the maturity of NFV incubation and the successful deployment of NFV. Therefore, 5G has high expectations for NFV. In order to welcome the 5G era, the industry needs to promote the rapid deployment of NFV.

"China Telecom's network reconstruction takes into account the needs of the 5G era." Shi Fan from China Telecom Beijing Research Institute said that China Telecom will promote network reconstruction based on SDN/NFV for the 5G era. This year, a series of work will be carried out on SDN and NFV. The goal for the next three years is to enable half of the networking services of government and enterprise customers to be realized based on SDN technology. At the same time, 40% of China Telecom's network infrastructure will be virtualized in 2020.

In fact, in addition to telecom operators, manufacturers are also promoting the implementation of SDN/NFV. "In the 5G era, the trend of network cloudification will intensify, which means that the network must not only be efficient, but also virtualized and elastic." Intel's Yan Feng believes that the high reliability and high forwarding performance requirements of the telecom network of 5 9s or even 6 9s, as well as the distributed deployment of the data plane, have put forward higher requirements for the cloudification of the entire telecom network. How to apply the flexibility and elastic deployment of IT and cloud computing to the telecom cloud is a challenge facing the entire industry. Therefore, what Intel is currently doing is to work with partners to gather the strength of the industry chain and "bring together" these demands representing different directions.

Yan Feng revealed that Intel advocates and practices open source, so in promoting the development of NFV, Intel is leveraging the power of open source platforms to integrate some key technologies. At the same time, technical problems exposed during the promotion process are fed back to the open source community, so as to more efficiently and effectively promote the pace of technological innovation in various aspects including chips, network cards, accelerators, and software, and ultimately help NFV technology mature and be deployed on a large scale to welcome the full arrival of the 5G era.