Spirent talks testing and service assurance for cloud-native, disaggregated 5G networks
Although we’re well into the 5G era, the transition to 5G Standalone and the monetization opportunities that come with offering more responsive, customized networks are still relatively nascent. Beyond just technological upgrades that allow operators to sell and capture new revenue from bespoke network slices, the value proposition also hinges on being able to guarantee the performance of those network slices. Given the foundational importance of reliably delivering the performance metrics end users need, what does the ongoing evolution of 5G mean for service assurance?
RCR Wireless News discussed this during Mobile World Congress 2023 with Spirent SVP and GM Doug Roberts. The traditional approach to service assurance, he explained, is centered around passive probing. With 5G, service assurance becomes centered around hardware/software disaggregation and network functions virtualization. “What that means,” Roberts said, “is we’re taking what used to be really large monolithic pieces of hardware sitting in a data center, and we’re now making them virtual functions throughout a very large, very distributed network.”
He continued: “Where do you put your probe when suddenly your network went from four key locations to any one of 1,000 locations? And by the way, it can change overnight pending some performance criteria that we’ve built into the [quality of service] system, or something related to that. So that’s been…one of the key fundamental challenges that 5G represents to a next generation…approach to service assurance.”
As networks become more complex and testing/assurance processes also become more complex, the high-level solution is in intelligent automation. Roberts discussed the need to apply AI and ML to deterministic, first-party data sets related to everything from 3GPP standards to self-prescribed SLAs and distributed computing resources. “Where ML comes into play,” he said, “is how do we learn within the network itself? Not what you determine or what I determine is normal or good, but how does the system itself determine…if those users were to be routed through Austin, Texas, versus Atlanta, Georgia, they would receive 30% better performance regardless of what the KPI or parameter is. These are all applications of ML that we are utilizing today.”
What impact will Open RAN have on testing?
In the larger sweep of the push to cloud-native Standalone 5G, operators are also reconsidering the legacy, monolithic approach to building a radio access network (RAN). Based on technical specifications developed by the O-RAN Alliance, operators around the world, both greenfield and brownfield, are deploying Open RAN systems wherein hardware and software are decoupled, virtualized, and deployed in a cloud environment.
Spirent VP of Product Management James Kimery identified multi-vendor interoperability as the cornerstone of Open RAN. It “gives operators the ability to mix and match different network components,” he said in an interview. This lets them “not only lower cost because the multi-vendor interoperability increases competition…but it basically widens the ecosystem of participating vendors in those RAN elements. And that enables more companies to be able to provide solutions to the service providers so they can offer more services, they can have better monetization opportunities, and so forth. So, the future looks bright.”
With new opportunities that speak to opex reduction and ability to capture new markets and new service revenue opportunities, Open RAN also comes with challenges operators have to navigate, especially testing—with multi-vendor systems comes the need to test the myriad hardware/software combinations in deployment scenarios running the gamut of public and private network scenarios.
Kimery stressed the importance of emulation and automation in this increasingly complex testing paradigm. “You don’t emulate them not only in terms of the interface…but at scale and at real world performance. And that’s what Spirent brings to the table. We have a core competence around real-time emulation where our functional elements can be swapped in/swapped out depending on the operator or the customers’ needs.”
Just as operators are leveraging automation in the management and orchestration of cloud-native, service-based architectures, that same paradigm also applies to pre-production testing. “As you have all these different emulation components, think about how difficult it can be to configure and operate each one of those,” Kimery said. “They all have to work together in order for the customer to realize the benefit.”
Spirent’s O-RAN Solutions give operators a single, unified user interface that lets them confidently prove out RAN configurations in the lab and speed time-to-market for new capabilities to be deployed in the live network. With “the pace of innovation now, in terms of updates, features, and functions, automation is critical,” Kimery said. “Customers need automation to be able to stay on top of these changes and to be able to deliver those services to the customers.”
