5G Core Architecture (5GC) is made possible with the help of new technologies such as:
1. Virtualization
2. Cloud Native
3. Containers
4. Micro-services
5. Automation and Orchestration
The above technologies are not new, but has been used in IT/DevOps from many years. Now we have integrated them in 5GC.
We shall have a look at them one by one.
1. Virtualization
Till now most of the mobile core application software runs on proprietary hardware. These hardware are developed by OEM for that particular customer.
These hardware will have a fixed speed and capacity. In future if they need to increase the capacity or speed, hardware needs to be swapped.
These will not be cost effective.
Virtualization helps applications on virtual machines and these virtual machines will run on COTS HW. (Commercial Off The Shelf Hardware).
This will help telecos to decouple the hardware and software. It will offer flexibility at a significant reduced cost.
Example:
In the above image we can see that we have a custom HW running a Custom OS and running a Custom App. Here if you want to run the custom application in a different hardware then it will not be possible. You need to buy hardware from the Application provider itself.
In VM based architecture, there will be a COTS hardware, it will have a guest OS like Linux and it will have a management layer called Hypervisor. It will helps to manage many virtual machines.
In Virtual Machines can have a custom OS and Custom Applications.
You can see that, 3 VM’s run on a single HW, but in traditional Architecture you need to have 3 different HW. Also scaling up and down is possible in realtime when using VM based architecture.
2. Cloud Native
Cloud Native approach uses cloud computing to build and run scalable applications. Some of the principles involved in cloud native are:
1. Applications are Infrastructure agnostic. It means, applications will not worry about underlaying hardware.
2. Cloud Native applications run in smaller and manageable apps.
3. Due to distributed in nature, during faults and maintainance, impact will be less.
4. Orchestration and Automation softwares can be used to manage the applications.
3. Containers
A container is a software application that is used to pack up the code and all its dependencies. With the help of containers the applications will be able to run quickly from one computing platform to another.
A container is a standalone application and can be deployed on any hardware and run the application directly.
4. Micro-services
It is an architectural approach where in a large application is composed of multiple smaller independent services that interact with each other over API.
Example:
In the above image, over the left side we have Monolithic Architecture, where in all the applications are packed inside a big application. If any one of the service fails, whole application will be impacted.
On the right side we have Micro-services based architecture, where multiple independent applications communicate with each other with the help of API.
The advantages are:
1. Applications can be changed quickly
2. Independent software upgrades
3. If one service is down, will not impact the whole application.
5. Automation and Orchestration
SON can be used for automation
5G architecture is built on top of micro-services. So automation can be done more efficiently.
AI and ML can be used and can be integrated across all aspects of mobile systems.