Abstract
Foreseen 5G verticals hold the promise of being true value-added services, hence bringing significant income to their respective providers. However, the nature of these verticals are very demanding in terms of both economic and technical requirements, such as multi-operator cooperation, end-to-end quality assurance, and the unified orchestration of network and cloud resources. Existing systems fall short of satisfying these requirements, but emerging network softwarization and resource virtualization technologies, such as SDN and NFV, show promise for being key enablers in this context. In this article, we introduce the 5G Exchange (5GEx) concept that builds on SDN and NFV, and facilitates the provisioning of multi-operator 5G services by means of inter-operator management and orchestration of virtualized network, compute, and storage resources. We present potential 5GEx use cases, conceptual architecture, and value proposition. We also outline open research questions on how to exchange information in such a coopetitive environment, and provide an outlook on the impact of 5GEx on a network service provider's business and operation.
Highlights
Introduction iew ev rRInternet services have evolved rapidly, covering all aspects of communication and infotainment
We introduce the novel 5G Exchange (5GEx) concept: drawing on the disruptive innovative technologies of softwarized service orchestration and control (SDN)
The advent of the 5G era brings with itself the promise of value creation by means of a wide range of verticals
Summary
Internet services have evolved rapidly, covering all aspects of communication and infotainment. Services such as video-on-demand or online gaming are already popular, while additional verticals, integrating cloud and IoT, are envisioned in the context of 5G [1] Efficient provisioning of these services as high-value products in the market requires serviceaware routing, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) assurance including dependability aspects, elastic resource and dynamic service orchestration (over network and cloud infrastructures) and flexible service management. The softwarization of the network control plane and the virtualization of resources can be powerful enablers in the context of a novel exchange mechanism supporting on-demand service creation, standard resource abstractions, resource trading and flexible inter-provider Service Level Agreements (SLAs) Such an exchange framework has the potential to remove the inherent shortcomings of today’s solutions, enable 5G value creation at the network edge and matching of requirements of 5G applications and services to properties of connectivity services end-to-end over the virtualized network infrastructure.
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