“The network of the future is a cloud of a cloud of a cloud,” said Viavi Solutions CTO Sameh Yamany
5G is opening up support of new verticals and use cases via a more flexible network — but it also brings new challenges for network testing, according to Viavi Solutions CTO Sameh Yamany.
“One of the major changes we are seeing in the industry today is that traditionally, networks have been built by stitching together static components—physical devices that were purposely built for voice, video, wireless,” Yamany said in a session at the recent Test and Measurement Forum virtual event. Those components were managed, more or less, in silos, he added: As part of the last mile, the Radio Access Network, the backhaul or the core network. That was fine for awhile, but increased demand and the desire to extend networks’ ability to support new use cases with specific demands has meant that a change was needed. “This kind of network had to evolve, to become almost completely automated, with zero-touch services,” Yamany explained. “You don’t want to actually do a lot of manual configuration. The idea is to be able to quickly, for time to market, bring in a new vertical, a new service and the whole network adjusts itself. … This is really … the goal of all the transformation that we have been seeing happening in the telecom and cloud service providers area for the last few years.”
In general, he summarized this transformation as involving five aspects:
-The network core becoming more “cloudified”
-The proliferation of edge computing
-Changes in the Radio Access technology
-Increased openness in the form of Open RAN, and
-The need to support the types of connectivity demanded by new devices and things such as drones and vehicles.
Each of those five aspects also impacts the processes of network testing and verification, as well as the management of network user experience.
It requires extensive testing to verify that edge and low-latency services such as cloud gaming will perform as expected, he said, in order to live up to user expectations. In addition, Open RAN puts new demands on testing because of the necessity of making sure that everything works properly given the multi-vendor nature of the environment, plus demands on synchronization and timing between different interfaces as well as end to end capacity and load testing — and the Open RAN systems’ relationships with legacy systems. The type of end device also impacts the type of testing that needs to be done to ensure performance, he added — it matters whether it is a drone, a vehicle or an industrial sensor on the other end of the transmission.
Broadly, the nature of the network itself is changing, which naturally impacts how you test such a network, and the services that run upon it.
“The network of the future is a cloud of a cloud of a cloud,” Yamany said. “Each one of them, you can … automatically reconfigure and create a slice across the different components using orchestration, with the required security, with all the different software … and NFVs, and build it for a very specific vertical. …
“The challenge here,” he added, “is that even the process of how you manage the slice, how you guarantee the slice, how you measure the performance of the slice, how you scale it up, scale it down — all the testing requirements, all the verification requirements, [have] to also be built within the slice.” Simply verifying the access network, the middle mile connectivity and the core network isn’t enough, Yamany said — everything has to work together, which calls for a new data-oriented and analytics-oriented culture within the telco.
“You have to manage [the network] in a continuous mode,” he said, “not just trying to focus on RAN or core. … You have to look at the entire slice of the network and manage it in an automatic fashion.”
How are carriers navigating all of this? One way is through the use of emulated 5G network digital twins, Yamany said. “Since it is all software, we can bring data from the real network and create a digital twin, very similar to the real one, where you can test new ideas, new policies, new apps,” he added. Not only does that means that new network components can be tested, but it also means that new applications can be brought onto the network with less risk of disruption, with real-time scenarios able to be used to see how specific apps are actually performing and whether they achieve the desired latency, for example.
“The best innovation is the one we don’t know yet,” Yamany said. “Providing this kind of platform will enable a lot of these innovations.”
View the session on-demand via the Test and Measurement Forum website.
