Technology pillars in the architecture of future 5G mobile networks: NFV, MEC and SDN

Abstract

This paper analyzes current standardization situation of 5G and the role network softwarization plays in order to address the challenges the new generation of mobile networks must face. This paper surveys recent documentation from the main stakeholders to pick out the use cases, scenarios and emerging vertical sectors that will be enabled by 5G technologies, and to identify future high-level service requirements. Driven by those service requirements 5G systems will support diverse radio access technology scenarios, meet end-to-end user experienced requirements and provide capability of flexible network deployment and efficient operations. Then, based on the identified requirements, the paper overviews the main 5G technology trends and design principles to address them. In particular, the paper emphasizes the role played by three main technologies, namely SDN, NFV and MEC, and analyzes the main open issues of these technologies in relation to 5G.

IoT’s Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco’s Perspective

“…Three levels of priorities (high, medium, low) are associated with the performance requirements of activity-based classes of IoT applications as shown in Table 4. The prioritization of performance requirements is inspired by analysis of related work undertaken in [213]. Some activity-based classes of IoT applications may demand optimization of multiple performance requirements.…”

“…For example, according to Table 3, the managing/controlling activity can be realized in several domains, such as healthcare, food, energy, transportation and logistics. For each domain, we have identified an application example, such as remote surgery [213] in the healthcare domain, food processing facilities [96] in the food domain, energy distribution [12] in the energy domain and traffic/driving [12,213] in the transportation and logistics domain. According to diverse performance requirements of these IoT applications [214], managing/controlling activity in healthcare, food, transportation, and logistic domains can be associated with the uMTC service class, while the energy domain can be mapped to the mMTC service class.…”

“…Required latency levels depend on the particular IoT application [8,16,28], being the narrowest in uMTC managing/controlling activity with a value that should not exceed 1 ms [8]. For example, the tolerable delay for use case mobile health [215] and remote surgery application is in order of sub-milliseconds [213]. For V2X communications, latencies should be ultra-low for some warning signals [8].…”

“…A more detailed description of performance requirements for each activity-based class of IoT applications is provided in Section 4, while in Section 5 it is discussed how these requirements can be accomplished in the radio access part of 5G networks. Smart food/water monitoring uMTC Food processing facilities [96] Smart Transportation and Logistics uMTC Traffic, driving [12,213] Smart Energy mMTC Energy distribution [12,98] Legend: 5G (Fifth Generation), POS (Point Of Sale), mMTC (massive Machine Type Communication), uMTC (ultra-reliable Machine Type Communication).…”

“…5G networks should enable "zero latency" [103] represented by the millisecond level of E2E latency [16,26,27,213] through significant enhancements and new technology in architecture aspects [6,28,214], such as device-to-device (D2D) communication [5]. The IoT applications associated with uMTC monitoring and managing/controlling activities require low latency, as they tend to be real time.…”