Towards customizable networks

Abstract

The telecom industry keeps reinventing itself. Soon, the world will be experiencing the 5th generation mobile networks (5G). These 5G mobile systems are expected to meet different strict requirements beyond the traditional operator use cases. Major obstacles to overcome in 5G systems are principally the highly-centralized architecture of mobile networks along with the static provisioning and configuration of network nodes built on dedicated hardware components. This has resulted in lack of elasticity and flexibility in deployment of mobile networks; rendering their run-time management costly, cumbersome and time-consuming. On the other hand, mobile networks are nowadays architected to serve all mobile users; ensuring some degree of service-level differentiation, by making decisions on different user profiles, but with no specific tailoring of the functioning to the specific user needs. However, statistics demonstrate that users do not behave all in the same way. Furthermore, a single mobile network usually ensures the communication for all service types, regardless of the suitability of its available functionality to deliver these services with acceptable Quality of Experience and network efficiency. It becomes then apparent that having the same mobile network architecture serving all mobile users, let alone all mobile applications, despite the diversity they exhibit in their attitudinal response to mobile services, have to be rethought. 5G systems need to accommodate elasticity, flexibility, dynamicity, scalability, manageability, agility and customization along with different levels of service delivery parameters according with the service requirements. For this purpose, different requirements have to be met and numerous associated challenges have to be subsequently tackled. This keynote will touch upon the recent trends the mobile telecommunications market is experiencing and discuss the challenges these trends are representing to mobile network operators. To cope with these trends, the keynote will then showcase the feasibility of on-demand creation of cloud-based elastic mobile networks, along with their lifecycle management. The keynote will introduce a set of technologies and key architectural elements to realize such vision, turning end-to-end mobile networking into software engineering. The keynote will particularly showcase the need for the deep customization of mobile networks at different granularity levels: per network, per application, per group of users, per individual users and even per data of users. The keynote will also assess the potential of Network Function Virtualization, Software Defined Networking and Network Slicing to provide the appropriate customization and highlights the technology challenges. The keynote will also elaborate on a high level architectural solution addressing a massive multi-slice environment.