5G was designed to be orchestrated. Why?
The 5G environment will be more complex than earlier generations, so to meet modern business challenges and provide a diverse range of services your network needs to be automated and orchestrated at various levels.
5G capabilities that need automation and orchestration:
- Cloud-native resource orchestration: 5G network functions are expected to be deployed in a virtual and, ideally, cloud-native environment
- Network slice orchestration: Managing a few slices manually is possible; however, orchestration is needed to meet service level agreements for a large number of network slices
- Edge sites: The much greater number of edge facilities, compared to traditional, centralized data centers, requires the ability to easily manage this distributed resource landscape
- API exposure: The 5G standard network exposure function (NEF) exposes APIs, allowing application-specific network control. This enables services to be composed seamlessly in real time
- Self-order services: In terms of digital enablement, customers now demand online channels that complement traditional sales channels
The amazing role of the orchestrator
In its purest form, the service represents the outcome to the consumer, independent of how the service provider chooses to deliver it. The service provider will secure the service outcome by constantly optimizing network resources. As a result, a key responsibility of orchestration is to compose resources into topological structures, including network slices, software-defined networking, Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) services and NFs (virtual and cloud native), to meet the service intent. The traditional way to do this is through manual and automated processes. This is a simple concept, but it becomes complex when all events impacting a service are considered: each event or lifecycle step, such as scale in-out, has to be considered in the scripts. This becomes unmanageable alongside the extra complexity of virtual infrastructure and network slicing.
This led to the concept of “infrastructure as code”: where the desired topology is explicitly defined in a declarative language, such as TOSCA, rather than being implicit as the result of a series of steps. This creates the role of the orchestrator to calculate and execute appropriate steps, resulting in the correct network topology.
A further job of the orchestration solution is to ensure that service intent is maintained, even as circumstances change, including network faults, increased service consumption, congestion of shared resources and opportunities to optimize how the service is delivered. This requires an ongoing closed-loop approach. By monitoring the service and underlying network, events and threshold violations can be detected to trigger decisions based on defined policies, to adjust or redesign the network to continue to meet the required service levels. It’s also important to monitor the effectiveness of the policies. Simply scaling out an NF might be ineffective if it places more load on the transport network. Where the service is dependent on multiple network domains, some or all of those domains may need to be managed in tandem to achieve the required outcome. At some point, the orchestrator might need to structurally redesign the topology; for example, to relocate an NF closer to the source of the traffic.
Orchestration will ease your network evolution
Network evolution and digital transformation are happening in parallel. Figure 1 below shows typical NFV, 5G and business initiatives currently occuring in most large service providers. However, orchestration is a key enabler of these initiatives. In this complex environment, there is no one-size-fits-all migration path to 5G and orchestration.
Figure 1: typical ongoing business initiatives for communication service providers.
However, to ease the digital transformation for service providers, we’ve divided the automation journey into steps, allowing you to identify where you are currently and what the next step in your automation journey should be.
Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration
Read our new solution brief here
DownloadThe Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration solution enables a step-by-step journey to complete zero-touch automation and assurance. The product suite covers everything from simple network function lifecycle automation to complete management of complex network slices and services. Learn more about the automation journey here.
DownloadEricsson Dynamic Orchestration drives end-to-end network automation and service orchestration across multiple domains in design-time and run-time environments. It automates the network and orchestrates services in both design time and run time using continuous delivery and deployment to manage the end-to-end service lifecycle as represented in figure 2.
Figure 2. Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration end-to-end network automation and service orchestration across multiple domains in design-time and run-time environments.
There are three distinct phases in the lifecycle: design, deploy and operate.
- The design phase drives the acceleration of new service introduction – it reduces time to market by decreasing service design time, enabling service component reuse and automating test and verification. Time to market can be reduced by around 70 percent and is a key enabler for new revenue streams.
- The deployment phase enables new products and services to be ordered and deployed efficiently. It provides a tight linkage between service ordering and resource orchestration, improving service fulfillment.
- The operate phase employs closed-loop service assurance and AI analytics to manage network and service performance, including automated reconfiguration and instantiating new resources if required.
Composite orchestrator
Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration uses the concept of a composite orchestrator, which tightly integrates service order management (BSS) with multi-domain and resource orchestration (OSS) to provide an intent-driven customer experience.
Service assurance
Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration provides assurance across both deployment and operations using CI/CD, meaning inputs from CENX Service Assurance and Ericsson Expert Analytics drive network and service changes through Ericsson Orchestrator.
Cross-domain automation
Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration is multi-vendor, multi-domain and multi-cloud capable. It can orchestrate services and automate networks across multiple domains to meet SLAs and policy-mandated performance. Ericsson Dynamic Orchestration manages our end-to-end network slice capability across multiple domains. Service assurance and analytics
5G was designed to be orchestrated. We recommend that 5G automation is treated as an early use case and aligned with other transformation programs. To keep total cost of ownership low, make sure you choose an orchestration vendor that is building on open source and industry standards that understand telco requirements, and keeps operations together.
Wherever you are on your journey, Ericsson can support you on your evolution path. We work with some of the largest service providers in the world and have the expertise and experience needed to become your trusted automation partner.
Happy reading!
Want to know more?
This post is part of our guide to building a cloud-native 5G Core blog post series, where we outline six strategic areas that form the foundation to a cloud-native core network capable of unleashing the full potential of 5G. Investing time in these topics will make you better equipped to plan, deploy and manage your new network for business success.
Continue reading the complete guide to dig deeper into each of its topic areas.
Read the previous articles of the series:
Building a cloud native 5G Core: the guide series
Your guide to building a cloud native infrastructure for 5G
Your guide to evolving to 5G Core with full efficiency
Your guide to enabling voice services in 5G networks
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