InterDigital and Orange demoed a service-based architectural approach to the 5G control plane
5G, as it continues to develop and be built out, is envisioned as a flexible connectivity medium that trades off proprietary equipment for a cloud-native architecture supported by low-cost, white box server hardware.
A service-based architectural approach will break down a 5G service chain into individual components capable of communicating with one another through implementation-independent interfaces; microservice can be distributed within a 5G network to make it easier for operators to spin-up new services quickly, much in the way webscale players like Amazon or Baidu.
A key aspect of this is the virtualization of network functions and software-defined networking with separation of the control and data planes. At a high level, the control plane essentially routes data traffic through a network and the data plane forwards the traffic along the path established by the control plane. Decoupling these two sets of functions allows for more efficient, automated management of increasingly complex networks.
In a recent demonstration, R&D firm InterDigital applied a service-based architecture to the 5G control plane, moving control functions completely into a cloud-based environment using standard server infrastructure. According to the company, this provides operators with improved “scalability, velocity and flexibility.”
Robert DFazio, VP of InterDigital Labs, hit on how this move makes operators more like webscale players. “The majority of the 5G effort and focus to date has been on radio access development, but fully virtualized and dynamic core infrastructure is vital if 5G is to accomplish its latency, throughput and capacity goals. Web service firms like Amazon and Google have successfully used a service-based approach to create highly scalable cloud infrastructure, and our demonstration shows that adopting such techniques can solve many of the cost and efficiency challenges ahead for 5G.”
InterDigital’s demo, conducted in partnership with Orange and hosted at a recent Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) event in Paris, applied the technology to the 3GPP-defined common communication enabler (COEN). The company described the demonstration as highlighting how “a 5G control plane can utilize the communication model of today’s web services to create multiple software instances” in a cloud environment. “This approach supports the evolution fo future telecoms infrastructure towards fully software-defined network and virtualized compute resources,” according to InterDigital.
