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The mobile industry is evolving and network function virtualization is a term that has achieved significant press, especially during the last Mobile World Congress event. During that event the over-arching benefits that NFV can deliver in the network core were well covered. However, little has been said about the services that could take advantage of NFV. Messaging, in particular, is one service that any operator considering NFV can realize an immediate benefit with. In many networks, messaging exists as siloed functions with differing end-user functionality, hardware, traffic and management requirements. Consolidating these onto a single platform should be a clear target for NFV — unlocking substantial savings in operating expense and capital expense.
The journey to NFV messaging
The SMSC and MMSC have been virtualized in the past, but not very often. This is because operators have been concerned about the reliability and availability of virtualized infrastructure as the telecom industry has more stringent service level agreements than IT services. Many telecommunication services have a crucial need for “five nines” high availability, high reliability, low latency and require a provision for regulatory requirements. There are also certain needs around timing and synchronization. Ensuring NFV caters for all of these is challenging. The virtualization of messaging services has also not been an immediate focus, as in most cases these services are already deployed on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. As this hardware is very affordable, it hasn’t been a target to leverage dedicated hardware over virtualized hardware. However, NFV is going to change all of this. As operators start to focus on NFV, a step change is required in how they do business and manage their networks. As part of this evolution, operators will also have to consider the mobile services that will run over, and utilize, virtual hardware and virtual functions.
Applications such as traditional mobile messaging, and new messaging services such as rich communications services, lend themselves very well to NFV ready networks. These services integrate with many of the functions NFV relates to, and should be first in line to be deployed into the newly virtualized network. These services also go through traffic peaks and troughs. As an example, some messaging services over Christmas and New Year peak at several factors higher than they do during normal daily operation. By deploying in a virtualized environment, operators can scale up and down based on service demand, and eventually, this scaling may be done automatically as the application becomes “aware” of the increased traffic load.
The onset of RCS means that messaging usage will migrate from the SMSC and MMSC toward the RCS application. This move to RCS will mean operators have the challenge of managing, maintaining and planning for multiple messaging services as in the beginning RCS will run in parallel with SMSCs and MMSCs. Consolidating these messaging services into a single solution in a virtualized environment not only enables operators to scale each messaging service based on its usage peaks and service growth; it also enables a simpler, more efficient route to consolidating messaging services so that a message is a message regardless of technology bearer used. As RCS gains momentum, and sees a growing user base, it will need to develop rapidly in order to keep up with the changes in end-user behavior. NFV also provides operators with the agility to perform the twofold task of evolving RCS rapidly and managing migration of users from traditional SMS and MMS messaging.
As well as enabling service agility and evolution, NFV also enables operators to create innovative new business models for messaging that can drive business sustainability. As over-the-top players are able to develop service functionality at a more rapid rate than operators, they have been quick to take a large slice of the messaging market. Operators have not been able to implement innovative services so quickly because of their larger network infrastructure costs and interoperability requirements. However, the advent of NFV provides a chance for operators to become more dynamic especially when it comes to launching new services, be they messaging or other, as the infrastructure costs and lead times are reduced and subscribers may be segmented to allow functionality to be based per segment rather than for all subscribers.
Manageability is the foundation
The main consideration for all network functions, including messaging, will be the manageability of the applications. The ability to increase and decrease used resources based on traffic profiles will be important, as will failover and disaster recovery scenarios. All this is quite standard with virtualization technology. However, messaging applications themselves will need to evolve to maximize the abilities that virtualized functions can offer and to work in harmony within the existing NFV ready network; as well as looking forward toward SDN. These are all items which will be addressed by the messaging services as NFV becomes widely adopted and networks evolve.
NFV messaging — pros and cons
NFV messaging can unlock a series of benefits for mobile operators. The ability to rapidly develop new services and features will be appealing. NFV will also serve to help them uncover improved network manageability, as virtual applications can be upgraded without the need to take existing nodes offline. Moreover, scalability is improved as new virtual nodes can easily be added to meet peak, and unplanned, network traffic demands. The use of hardware can also be maximized, as during low messaging traffic periods — unused hardware resources can be allocated to other applications.
That said, it will still be challenging to ensure 99.999% availability of any service in a virtual environment. Operators will have to make sure that traffic is not impacted by the failure of any virtual nodes or the virtualization layer. They will also have to develop processes to monitor and control virtualized services and scale systems dynamically. There is quite some discussion and work happening in this area already and it is a key goal in the trials currently underway.
In 2015, operators will begin the process of moving some of their functions into a virtualized live network and messaging is definitely one of those functions. The key success for NFV will not just be the operational and manageability improvements it enables within the core network, it is going to be much more about the ease with which new, and older, mobile services can be delivered in a more efficient way. It is not without its challenges, but the agility, manageability, scalability and cost effectiveness of NFV make it the perfect bedfellow for the successful and prosperous evolution of messaging services in a new IP-based, virtualized world.
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