As featuredin TM Forum's Inform
TM Forum has established a new 5G working group to tackle issues related to deployment and management of next-generation mobile technology. The goal is to develop a full-fledged collaboration project to advance the evolution of 5G, working with all key stakeholders including standards-development organizations like 3GPP and the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN), among others.
An exploratory meeting was held at Action Week in New Jersey in July, and virtually all attendees agreed to play a role in the working group. Attending members were from service providers including KDDI Labs, Orange, Saudi Telecom and Verizon, and suppliers including Ericsson, Huawei, JDSU, NetCracker, Oracle and Trident.
“Our ambition is to set up a collaboration project to address some of the critical challenges of 5G, including how to create sound business models and how to orchestrate and manage services in an increasingly connected world,” said Carl Piva, vice president for strategic programs at TM Forum.
The Forum’s Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project, which focuses on end-to-end management of virtualized and hybrid networks, the Open Digital Ecosystem project, which helps service providers connect with partners and customers in digital ecosystems, and the Customer Centricity program, which focuses on making sure that end users or tenants receive the right service, are all highly relevant to the development of 5G.
Why all the hype about 5G?
Unlike previous radio standards, which have principally focused on bandwidth and latency, 5G is being specifically designed to support a much broader spectrum of new ‘enterprise-class’ use cases, ranging from extended reach and speed of wireless connectivity, to sensor networks, tactile Internet, disaster relief and critical emergency response, and digital health services, as well as a host of consumer applications.
At Mobile World Congress in March, the NGMN published a 5G white paper outlining a broad vision for 5G with support from 21 leading service providers, almost all of them also TM Forum members.
The Forum believes that some of the key characteristics of 5G are:
- It will be based on a combination of network technologies supporting mobility and new business models. 5G will be an amalgamation of technologies and will need to interwork with current 3G, 4G and fixed technologies. It is intended to enable network operators to evolve their current business models to support a sustainable variety of business relationships between entities in the emerging digital ecosystem.
- It will be a truly elastic, dynamic set of infrastructure services. 5G will dynamically support user and application requirements based on context and behavior, and must support the dynamic partnering and business models. Network slicing will be one of the ways network capabilities will be offered to cater for diverse service characteristics. This holds potential to extend the reach into ecosystems beyond the traditional telecom domain.
- It will support an order of magnitude increase in capacity. The specifications for 5G are expected to connect up to 500 billion devices, which makes it ready to support massive rollout of Internet of Things/Internet of Everything use cases.
- It will provide higher speeds and lower latency. Download speeds will increase from 100-1000 Mbps with 4G to 10-100 Gbps with 5G. Latency needs to be guaranteed down to 1-10 milliseconds, allowing for time-critical use cases such as digital health, driverless cars and automotive safety applications.
- It will be largely software-based and will build on the programmability of networks. 5G will take advantage of the virtualization underway through network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) by leveraging programmability and agility. As such, the 5G architecture will be a native SDN/NFV architecture covering aspects ranging from devices, mobile and fixed infrastructure, network functions, value-enabling capabilities and all the management functions required to orchestrate the 5G network. This will create a new end-to-end management challenge.