During the 31st PT Expo China, the 5G-Advanced Core Industry Forum — hosted by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) — was successfully held in Beijing. Leo Ma, Vice President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, delivered a keynote speech entitled "5.5G Core Fuels New Services" at the forum. In the speech, Leo elaborated the key features of the 5.5G Core network based on industry practices and service development trends.
5.5G, also known as 5G-Advanced, goes one step further than 5G. The past few years witnessed the gradual maturity of 5G, which proves to be the fastest-growing mobile communications technology so far. It took four years for 5G to gain a billion users, while it took six years for 4G to do the same. 5G is also the most widely used mobile communications technology. It has entered 52 of the 97 categories of industries in China. Meanwhile, there are over 10,000 5G virtual private networks deployed and the number is still growing fast.
As network deployments expand, network services keep changing and are seeing three development trends:
Trend 1: New Video services are exploding. As the 2D-to-3D video conversion technology is being adopted and the terminal support capabilities develop, 3D videos can reach users more intensely. This will unveil the overwhelming development of spatial video services featuring 3D and XR. Yet, accompanying this is the immense network traffic, which is expected to be 2 to 10 times higher than before. This requires more diversified and dedicated UPFs on the core network as the general UPFs are not powerful enough to steer the much larger traffic.
Trend 2: New connections are emerging. Mobile VPN enables east-west connections for users, and as new capabilities such as the layer QoS, light NAS, and sensing function are introduced to the network, connections will extend from connections of people to connections of vehicles and everything.
Trend 3: New Calling boosts the development of intelligent services. It upgrades calling services from 5G-based HD video calling to intelligent and interactive calling based on 5.5G enhanced capabilities.
Against this backdrop, the 5.5G Core will be enhanced in three aspects: multi-mode connections, fully meshed networking, and intelligent capabilities.
Multi-mode connections: The user plane functions (UPFs) of the core network are diversified and dedicated.In the B2C field, New Video services, such as 3D and XR, pose strict requirements on the network — The network latency needs to be 5 ms to 20 ms, and the bandwidth needs to be 10 Gbit/s for a single user. To that end, dedicated UPFs such as M-UPF and xG-UPF need to be deployed on the network to steer heavy traffic, and connect to the terminal through the shortest path. In the B2B field, MEC is widely used on private networks for manufacturing. It is stretching services from campuses to production lines, and Layer 2 private networks are being used in more and more scenarios. In addition, as the private networks spread from one campus to multiple campuses of an enterprise, OT-UPFs are needed for Layer 2 interconnection, so as to upgrade the enterprise network to fit for multiple purposes, and better empower fully connected factories.
Fully meshed networking: From north-south to north-south and east-west communications, the core network is fully meshed.As mobile VPN sweeps the industry, east-west connections for users are enabled to achieve service access on multi-campus private networks. In addition, as the ambient IoT's tag management functions (TMFs) and IoV sensing functions (SFs) are being introduced and diverse UPFs such as xG-UPF, M-UPF, OT-UPF and V2X UPFs are to be deployed on the core network, a fully meshed network involving multiple layers and multiple service planes will be built.
Intelligent capabilities: Intelligent topology, experience, and services are achieved on the network.For intelligent topology, the service routing function (SRF) will be introduced to the fully meshed network. Such a network function can select optimal PSA UPFs, traffic-steering UPFs, and route paths for sessions on the network, based on service cost control, security, and data compliance policies. For intelligent experience, intelligent analysis and policy management capabilities are introduced to the core network. With these capabilities, the network can perform real-time experience awareness and intelligent analysis on specific services used by subscribers, and based on these achieve dynamic on-demand assurance and deliver differentiated service experiences to subscribers. For intelligent services, New Calling is a typical example. With the data channel technology, calling services are becoming more interactive and intelligent. Diverse intelligent services, such as real-time translation, fun calling, visual menu, and remote loss assessment, are made accessible during a call.
The evolution of 5.5G has reached a critical juncture, at which the construction and development of the core network are absolutely essential. Huawei will continue collaborating with industry partners to advance the evolution of network architectures and connection capabilities. Based on multi-mode connections and fully meshed networking, and by means of intelligent capabilities on topology, experience, and services, Huawei will build a powerful 5.5G Core for operators, so as to turbocharge their New Video, New Connection, and New Calling services, helping them seize business opportunities and fully embrace the new intelligent world.