Network Modernisation for 5G and Beyond by Richa Daga

Automatic Summary

Welcome to the Global Women Tech Network Conference 2022: A Journey into Network Modernization for 5G and Beyond

Hello. My name is Richard Dagga and I am a Software Engineer at CISCO. I have over a decade of experience developing packet optical products, contributing to the future of digital connectivity. I welcome all technology enthusiasts, especially women, to join me in this exciting discussion about the future of the internet as we know it. Today, we will explore network modernization for 5G and beyond.

What is 5G and Why do we need it?

5G or the fifth-generation cellular technology is a game changer in global digital connectivity. Here are some of the use-cases for 5G:

  • Enhanced Mobile Broadband or eMBB: An evolved version of existing 4G networks, eMBB offers faster connectivity and improved user experience for video streaming and lightning-fast browsing.
  • Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication or URLLC: This critical network use-case is designed for real-time, mission-critical communication. From autonomous vehicle technology to industrial robotic automation, and emergency disaster response, URLLC requires a highly reliable, low latency network.
  • Machine Type Communication or MMTC: Designed to scale the Internet of Things (IoT), MMTC can serve billions of low-cost, long-range, and energy-efficient connected devices across remote applications and cloud locations.

While these use-cases are appealing in the modern world, they cannot be achieved without network modernization. With 66% of the global population expected to be connected to the internet by 2023, the demand for bandwidth will be tremendous. Leveraging robust networks becomes vital for swift browsing and high-quality video content delivery.

The Need for Network Modernization

The current network infrastructures may not support the bandwidth requirements in the future. A challenge that 5G addresses with its promise of a new, flexible, and more efficient system. The demand for more bandwidth and higher speeds have initiated trends towards software-defined networking and new cloud architecture.

New Network Architecture for 5G

The 5G networking model supports service creation capabilities with features in both the radio access network, known as New Radios, and the 5G core network, known as 5GC or 5G Core. The implementation of this approach allows network architecture to be built from modular elements that assemble into a whole through open and interoperable interfaces.

This new architecture addresses challenges associated with building multi-vendor networks by harmonizing them to a common feature set. It also simplifies network operations, reduces operational costs, and offers better control over capital expenditures, rendering the current mobile supply chain outdated.

Edge Infrastructure for Network Modernization

With the decomposition of 5G and its software-defined networking attribute, a major architectural shift to an edge infrastructure that combines decomposed subscriber management with access functionality is made possible. The Edge Cloud, for instance, facilitates offloading and enables local virtualized services at a metro level.

The Future of Network Modernization with 5G

The full potential of 5G can only be unlocked when the cloud network is fully virtualized from the RAN (Radio Access Network) to the Core. This disruptive architectural shift enables applications such as fixed wireless, low latency services, and rich media. It brings about a great user experience enabled by mobile access edge computing infrastructure.

In conclusion, the success of 5G services is dependent on network modernization and the benefits are immense. If you're interested in the technical advancements happening in CISCO and other companies within the world of 5G, feel free to connect with me on Linkedin.

Acknowledgement

Thank you to the Women in Technology for providing a platform that gathers individuals passionate about technology and the advancement of women in tech.

Lastly, thank you for joining me in this enlightening session on network modernization for 5G and beyond. Explore the potential of the digital future, today.


Video Transcription

Hello, everyone. A very warm welcome to all of you to the Global Women Tech Network Conference. 2022. I'm Richard Dagga. I'm a technical speaker, author, mentor and an engineer by heart. I'm passionate about technologies and chip sets that connect the world.I'm working as a software engineer at CISCO and have a decade of experience in development of packet optical products that are building the internet of the future. I'm really excited to get this wonderful opportunity to interact with all of you here, people who are as passionate about technology and believe in advancing the cause of women in tech as I do. So, please join me for this session to take a journey into network modernization for five G and beyond. In this session, we will cover five G service types, the evolution challenges in the way of five G, insights into radio signal processing stack and edge infrastructure. And most importantly, the need to upgrade networks by designing a new fabric architecture for making five G possible. So five G is the fifth generation of cellular technology and is getting widely deployed around the world today. So let's understand what all is possible with five G coming in.

So these are the use cases that you can see on the screen. Mobile broadband, it addresses the human centric use cases of five G for access to multimedia content services and data for and faster connectivity to handle higher quality video content. So emb that is enhanced mobile broadband is a natural evolution to existing four G networks that is faster and will provide a better user experience than current mobile broadband services. The key criteria which is enabled by this use case is seamless coverage. So the use cases for EMBB are like video streaming. So I think the way you and I are interacting today is video streaming so that becomes faster and more effective. And five G comes in. So lightning fast browsing such use cases are important which are enabled by enhanced mobile broadband. But do you think that these use cases are mission critical? For instance, if network latency occurs and results in an additional half second to download a video or render a web page, it will probably not ruin the customer experience but in preventing a traffic accident or running an industrial robot that half second becomes so important.

So in scenarios like those delay and failure are not an option. So that's why come the next use case of five G that is ultra reliable low latency communication, your LLC can support real time mission critical communication like autonomous driving, industrial robotic automation and emergency disaster response.

So the tactile response time with this use case is expected to be less than one millisecond. So this use case has stringent requirement for capabilities such as throughput, latency and availability. Some examples that fall in this category are wireless control or of industrial manufacturing or production processes promote medical surgery. So I think this is one of the use kits which ha which we have been thinking a lot during the pandemic like if we can have remote medical surgeries taking place and that can only be enabled if there is ultra low latency in communication. So smart grids, transportation safety are all enabled with this use case. The third use case is MMTC that is machine type communication. This is the key technology needed to scale up the internet of things from its current limited use to its general use by enterprises and even the public entities. So this can help to achieve massive internet of things miot can serve. That is massive internet of things miot can serve billions of low cost, long range and energy efficient connected devices across remote applications as well as cloud locations. So now coming to the main point, we discussed about these five G service types.

This is everything that is the magic of five G which is brought to us. But why are we talking about network modernization? So what is the need of it? Aren't our existing networks enough to achieve all of the requirements? Today's digital world. So I believe not here are some of the statistics by 2023 if you would imagine 66% of the global population will be connected to the internet. So if so many of the users will be connected to the internet, you can imagine the amount of bandwidth that is required to support all of them. And global fixed broadband speed will reach 110.4 mbps and connection speed will reach 575 mbps and five G. So the networks are facing, they are on the verge of facing unabated growth and hence there comes the need of network modernization. So what did you think like augmented reality, virtual reality, Ioiot artificial intelligence, edge computing. All the latest technology, all the buzz words that you have been hearing a lot, nothing can't survive without bandwidth. So which is possible if we we have robust networks. So the successful operators which you see they run profitable businesses that rely on revenue from attractive service products that address both the consumer and the enterprise market. So today's consumer products, they integrate voice and data plane, whereas enterprise products tend to focus on the needs of businesses.

So increasingly operators are giving us capabilities that allow other businesses to work. So network requirements are everywhere today. So five G networking is designed to address service creation capabilities with features in both the radio access network known as new radios and the five G core network known as five GC or the five G core. So everything if we have been talking about network modernization, why the question always is like if we want to understand anything, we should always go into the depth that why is it required, it is required? Because obviously there would have been some challenges in evolving to five G.

The promise of five G is of a system integrating with the new radio interface that is defined for a broad variety of use cases. So the network it has to offer lower operational expenses such as Opex and better control over Capex costs throughout the mobile supply. So a monolithic functional implementation such as the base transceiver station is an is an example of why the current mobile supply chain is outdated. So with this implementation operators today had to pick one vendor per market. But you know if there's no competition, there's no demand of vendors which is there we get and isolated to only one single vendor which is available. So this happened and we had a limited set of applications that the operators can provide to their customers. So sometimes these vendor dependencies and lock in can propagate into other domains when proprietary features are implemented. So that's why to solve all of all of these problems came the software defined attribute of the emerging five G solution set. So if a mobile network operator, if it embraces the principles of this aggregation and decomposition that can have software defined attributes. So both of these principles are at the heart of what it means for a work to be software defied. It means that software is a separate purchasing decision from the hardware and that commercial off the shelf hardware are used wherever possible. So decomposition, it means that the network architecture is built from modular elements that assemble into a hole through open and interoperable interfaces.

So that's why this helps to get over the existing problematic closed R. So with the help of Open R alliance and by employing the principles of software desegregation and leveraging decomposition, which in the five G system architecture is an attribute of both the radio access network as well as the code. It is possible to build an optimal architecture that addresses the OPEC and the apex challenges. So this new ran cloud architecture. So at the time of four G, we had four old radio access networks which were distributed R A. But coming to the five G, we have centralized R A. So this new cloud run architecture, it addresses the challenges of building multi vendor networks and harmonized to a common feature set. So one fundamental characteristic is the decomposition of the radio signal processing stack using standardized splits.

So if you would see and understand here, the radio signal processing stack decomposition, it maps functions in the stack as follows. That is service delivery adaptation protocol or S DAB. It is in the new radios in the NR only packet data convergence protocol, that is the P DC P and radio resource control. That is the control functions are mapped to the centralized unit. These stack functions are packet level manipulations that aren't timing can be easily implemented in a virtualized environment. The mid haul links. So if you would be hearing about cross hall architectures, so they also come into place when five G came in with the network divided into front hall, mid hall and the back hall. So the mid haul links that connect the centralized unit to the distributed units are defined cu location is excellent for deploying user plane functions. That is the upf in the decomposed packet code architecture. The decomposed packet code is known as the cups that is the control and user plane separation in three GB B release 14 and five GC in three GB pr 15. The radio link control RLC and medium access control MAC and the file layers map to a distributed unit.

The du performs significant preparation for the RF layer including rate adaptation channel coding modules and scheduling. So the baseband radio functions up and down conversion and application along with analog beam forming map into a remote unit deployed at the cell site are known as the remote radio heads.

So if you would see what happened used to happen in five G, we had a BB that was the base band unit. But with the coming of the five GC and that BB became decentralized and disintegrated into distributed unit and centralized unit. So the interface that was existing previously used between the radio unit and the BB was the sipri that is centralized packet radio interface. But this sipri cannot be enhanced and used for the five G architectures because it cannot cater to the huge bandwidth demand that five G brings in front of us. So that's why I came into the picture E which is used in the front hall networks. So if you would see here in the next slide, this is the edge infrastructure. This is this enables us to achieve the ultra ultra reliable low latency use cases of five G. So the decomposition and with this aggregation of five G, which for the software defined networking attribute, they only enabled a major architectural shift to an edge infrastructure that combines decomposed subscriber management with access functionality. So as the R and the core become decomposed, it became logical to create an intermediate location. This location would consolidate the centralized unit workloads and a user plane function from the mobile code. So you can see here this is the edge cloud in the figure.

And I think this edge cloud deserves a complete separate session of its own if I would want to describe what it is. But the point is that because of the five G having software defined attributes, the edge cloud became possible and it facilitated offloading and enabled local virtualized services at a metro level. So this, these are the interfaces that I explained in the previous slide, if you would see here, that is the four GCR that had the base B unit. But with the five G coming in this base band unit become this Agra and decentralized into the distributed unit. And the centralized unit and the link between them is called as the front hall. The initial link that it describes the link between the radio unit and the distributed unit is the front hall. And what we need today in network modernization is EIP to support it. So if we move further as we talked about the edge, so the attribute of the edge actually is bandwidth reduction. So it performs computation at the edge itself to reduce bandwidth. And if for example, for virtual reality applications, if you would see the edge can compute a field of view that would otherwise have to be computed from massive amount of data associated to all the possible horizontal and vertical fields of view.

So in edge computing, the operator deploys a five G co user plane function that is the upf and strap located parts of the network where a hosting environment for the cloud computing is also deployed. So the same cloud environment can support the five G infrastructure workload such as the upper layer of the new radio signal processing stack as well as the UF. So this new fabric architecture that we talked about which becomes of prime importance, it supports horizontal scaling of a virtualized infrastructure and provides a cost effect, scaling of high speed 1025 or 100 G interface that are needed to handle five G speeds. So this solution is differentiated with the use of segment routing. So this is another important criteria that needs to be understood that is coming up in the five G world. That is the which supports overlay networking network slicing and traffic segmentation within the fabric and in the transport network. So policies and intent can be encoded in the segment routing header and propagated throughout the network. So this is a simplified representation of segment routing through our MP S network.

And the benefits are such that the biggest packet networks in the world by nor counts mobile networks are well suited to the benefits of the segment routing because segment information is embedded in the segment routing header at the address router R one in which you will see.

So it defines an explicit path to the destination router via intermediate routers. That is the R two and R three. So sr that the segment routing brought us a lot of benefits such as network slicing addressing the network scale. It simplified the network for us and reduced the OPEC other benefits are it made the networks very resilient, providing fast rerouting and protection that is superior to the current levels of router protection network utilization became wonders because it helped us to effectively distribute load while guaranteeing bandwidth to mi critical applications network topology.

It enabled the multi access edge computing use case. So this is finally the summary of what all we thought the world in this quick session. And that is that the cloud network has to be fully virtualized from the R to the core if we want to reap in the benefits of five G. And with this disruptive architecture in fl place, we can enable applications such as fixed wireless, low latency services and rich media. And all of this also enables mobile access that is edge computing infrastructure that enables the best possible use experience. So I tried to sum all of this that is network modernization required for five G in these slides. I know the technical session, we cannot cover all of these details associated in depth. But if you would want to know more about it, you can connect to me further at linkedin and I would be able excessively eager to tell you what are the technological advancements that are happening in Cisco and the other companies and what all is needed and what all is happening in the world of five G to enable high speed bandwidth.

And if you have any questions right now, you can connect to me with in the chat section and I would be here to answer them. Thanks a lot for being with me here throughout this session. Thank you. Women in technology for giving us this opportunity to interact with like minded people who are so passionate about technology and advancing women in tech. Thanks a lot.