How will the new network edge be assured?

As 5G networks start to rollout and strict service requirements become a reality, the need for service assurance moves to the forefront rapidly

Services and applications, in conjunction with the network functions that can support operational, commercial and customer needs, are being deployed on more distributed and virtualized environments. The need for service deployment assurance for both the underlying infrastructure, as well as services, is growing exponentially.

Gaming, virtual and augmented reality lead the charge

A good example of where performance and service assurance are in sharp focus are the various commercial use cases being discussed around 5G; such as gaming, virtual and augmented reality, IoT, vehicle automation, etc. They will all require a serious reduction in latency, jitter, etc. to function properly.

These commercial use cases require a more distributed service environment at the edge where computing resources are key to support the deployment of 5G and low-latency applications. In short, multi-access edge computing (MEC) is the enabler for real-time and low latency applications and is the foundation for reducing inter-networking congestion.

The challenge here lies in the impact of how service assurance, visibility and maintainability of the network, applications and their related virtual functional requirements will be impacted by the new MEC architecture.

To put it simply, a ‘service’ or ‘network function’ can reside anywhere and everywhere. The related performance, network and service assurance capabilities must be scalable, granular, and flexible enough to keep up with the dynamic growth and demand for compute resources where they are needed and can be located.

Managing the new 5G service-based network architecture

With all of these new parameters and requirements at hand, manual configuration, analysis, correlation and intervention is just not realistic. Assurance solutions need to be able to not only measure, trigger events and report but must also interact and be part of the umbrella eco system needed to manage the new 5G service-based network architecture.

Visibility into the MEC environment is vital in order to take control of the service quality and customer experience. The next evolution means that many traffic flows will never reach the core and will be evaluated based on their point of access. Thus, MEC will have a significant effect on the visibility into the SLA’s and network – wherever it may lie and no matter the multi-vendor, multi-operator, multi-cloud domains it is spanning.

Perhaps one key addition to these notes is that, with cloud-native computing near the network edge the vRAN/O-RAN can and will become a part of the edge domain, that ultimately will need to be monitored as part of the MEC.

Microservices based agents will be key in the future of the vRAN architecture

In summary, the ability to monitor network health, service layers, the application and being able to understand and analyze them requires a different and next generation network-based paradigm. Traditional methods will simply not scale and be able to handle the more complex distributed architecture. The ability to not only measure but to understand your performance measurements is the key and compute your SLA’s or KPIs where needed to be able to take localized data, this will be the path to the future!

Explore Accedian’s Skylight suite of solutions, they provide end-to-end visibility into SDN and NFV-based services. Using Accedian’s years of experience in the service provider environment, plus our Layer 4-7 monitoring and reporting for network and application performance, service providers can fully assure network and cloud-based services are meeting agreed performance objectives.