How to Accelerate Time to Value for 5G Through Real-Time Service Assurance

With ultra-high-speed wireless broadband services, 5G promises to transform the global digital landscape, bringing to life concepts such as smart homes, offices, factories, stadiums, vehicles, and cities. The technology promises a slew of outcomes, which include low-latency communication, enhanced broadband access, and machine-type communication, among others. However, to make these happen and meet user expectations of ultra-high speed, minuscule latency, and greater availability, reliability, and throughput would entail service providers to transform their 5G network infrastructure.

This can be a herculean task as legacy service providers would have to manage 5G environments comprising complex multi-cloud, multi-vendor, and multi-technology environments. When these are added to containerized and virtualized network functions based on the architecture of traditional 4G and 3G wireless networks, they can scale the complexity of heterogeneous networks to a different level altogether. Furthermore, the networks are often supported by disparate technologies, operators, vendors, and tools to meet rising customer expectations.

Since customers look at the overall service level instead of the nitty-gritty mentioned above, the service providers need to offer a high level of 5G assurance in real-time. In doing so, the operators have to manage both the physical and virtualized network architectures and address issues swiftly in real-time. The service providers are aware that poor 5G service can lead to lost customers, lasting brand damage, and broken contracts. Also, given 5G’s low latency and dependence on edge devices, the networks can turn out to be less tolerant to faults than other legacy wireless technologies such as 4G and 3G. So, in the event of outages or other issues, the 5G service providers should have the processes, personnel, and platforms to address them in no time. Let us understand how real-time 5G service assurance can be ensured for all stakeholders.

How can 5G transformation happen with real-time 5G assurance?

To accelerate time to value for 5G services, minimize disruptions, and enable automation in real-time, service providers need to implement 5G network testing in earnest. The ways to go about implementing 5G assurance are as follows:

Use AI and ML capabilities: When SLAs are on the verge of failing due to outages, AI and ML capabilities ought to be leveraged for testing 5G networks to minimize response times and improve service levels. The AI and ML algorithms can identify the patterns in network failures and conduct root-cause analysis in real-time to generate greater insights and improve response times. Developers can optimize the AI and ML algorithms for specific metrics, KPIs, event management processes, and network topology. They may also predict the occurrence of failures based on the performance metrics or thresholds set by the service providers. Further, providers can leverage such predictive maintenance models to reduce downtime and enhance service levels.

Identify key metrics and map the topology: Identify and curate all metrics and KPIs used to benchmark service levels across the 5G network. Thereafter, get a comprehensive view of the network by identifying all virtual and physical nodes, containerization platforms, standalone and connected networks, and orchestration services.

Find out the process of event management: Understand the way a 5G service provider reacts to events. This knowledge is important to optimizing or automating event management and achieving 5G transformation.

Integrate and deploy: 5G application testing solution ensures a seamless transition of 5G services for key stakeholders such as IT leaders, business honchos, and select members of the user base without interfering with network uptime and service levels.

Ongoing support: Given that networks are dynamic environments, ongoing support for network automation should be provided. The process may include introducing new KPIs, functionality, and more.

Different approaches to 5G assurance: In legacy network systems, service assurance is a predominantly manual process, often carried out in reactive mode. This encompasses taking remedial actions when faults or outages occur. In 5G, the assurance must go beyond manual monitoring and analysis and take different approaches. For instance, to gain visibility both at a macro and granular level, virtual probe-based assurance and monitoring need to be carried out. This includes collecting data from multiple sources, such as probing the core networks, network edge, and virtualization functions.

Smart monitoring: The size of data generated in 5G and the complexity of networks will demand service assurance to shift from complete to smart monitoring. However, this would depend on the policies defining the types of data and the parts of networks that are most critical. Smart sampling requires the monitoring policies to be aligned with the key service targets of the service providers. For instance, the assurance solutions should monitor the core of the network to offer complete visibility of key services. These include media delivery, service subscription and un-subscription, transactions of key customers, or voice calls, among others.

Conclusion

With the rollout of 5G network wireless or wired services, service providers need to proactively integrate and implement assurance solutions in their delivery architecture. This will drive 5G monitoring, reduce real-world outages, and ensure the meeting of various SLAs.