Dynamic Network Functions Placement — An Essential Capability for Successful 5G

Understanding the Three Stages
of Dynamic Placement

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Executive summary

5G represents a significant update to mobile services for consumers, enterprises, and the public sector. It promises massively improved bandwidth, latency reduced, reliability and flexibility. 5G also promises a new business opportunity for communication service providers (CSPs) beyond what’s possible today with 4G networks. This opportunity hinges on CSPs’ ability to provide differentiated services on 5G networks, particularly network slicing capabilities.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has been an essential foundation of CSP innovation. NFV liberates network functions from proprietary physical hardware and virtualizes, distributes, and scales these NFs across different infrastructure. Yet the initial phases of NFV evolution focused primarily on NF placement in pre-instantiated, fixed locations and did not address dynamic orchestration spanning multiple private and public clouds. To enable effective 5G services that can be monetized (e.g. leveraging network slicing), NFV will need to evolve. The new generation of NFV must handle cloud-native architectures, support dynamic NF placement across core and edge locations (including public cloud edges), and leverage AI and machine learning (ML).

However, dynamic NF placement optimization is a complex problem — to provide guarantees around isolation, capacity, latency and other QoS measures across each slice, while managing multiple end-to-end slices across diverse infrastructures requires a step-up for existing orchestration systems. These systems will need to manage complex goals and constraints, changing topologies and dynamic resource allocation across on-prem and public cloud infrastructure, and understand enterprise application and NF context, as well as user and device mobility and density characteristics.

AvidThink believes that as CSPs build out the network for 5G and transition from 5G non-standalone to 5G standalone, they should update the foundations of their orchestration system and upgrade to one that enables dynamic NF placement. Concurrent with these efforts, CSPs will also need to revamp the supporting infrastructure: the operations support systems (OSS) to continue to effectively provision, manage and monitor the dynamic network, and the business support system (BSS) to monetize these 5G services.

Whether CSPs choose to pursue building such systems in-house, or with a trusted and capable vendor partner, AvidThink recommends that CSPs take a three-phase approach (static to adaptive to autonomous) in their journey towards autonomous NF placement. The rewards for succeeding in this endeavor will increase CSP 5G profits and improve shareholder value.