Key Takeaways From 5G Transport & the Edge

10/11/2019

What were some of the key takeaways from Light Reading's 5G Transport & the Edge event in New York City? Two sober (just) editors chew the fat...

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Huub_van_Helvoort 10/16/2019 | 8:04:18 AM

Re: transport network slices already exist Slicing a network is like re-inventing the wheel.

Slicing has been used in telephony networks already 60 (sixty!) years ago. At that time it was called centrex. And for establishing network connections SS7 was used, which had the same features as SDN...

For the current transport network technologies ITU-T could have evaolved the existing functional modelling into a powerful means to describe and manage any transport network.

Unfortunately they recently started to use the term slicing, which IMO is going back in time, and not progressing.

- Huub -

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mvissers 10/11/2019 | 2:38:10 PM

transport network slices already exist Multi-service optical transport networks already support for more then ten years transport network slicing. SDH over OTN network slices are in use to support sub-1G private line services, Ethernet over OTN network slices and MPLS-TP over OTN network slices are in use to support virtual private line and virtual private network services. In these network slices, ODUk and ODUflex connections provide the network slice tunnels between the circuit- or packet-based network slice switching points. ODUflex based transport network slice tunnels can have any bit rate.

5G transport networks that are provided by the emerging mobile-optimized multi-service metro optical transport network (M-OTN) (refer to ITU-T G.Sup67) can use the inherently supported optical transport network slices.

Next step in the evolution of these optical transport network slices is to allow the user (service provider, enterprise, etc) to control its slice switches and aggregation of its flows into its slice tunnels. Transport SDN Controllers can provide user access to the slice switches and tunnel end points within OTN cross connects.

Another next step in the evolution is to make these network slices software defined network slices. Such network slices can be provided by software defined customer premise equipment (sdCPE) and customer network equipment (sdCNE). sdCPEs are located in customer locations and are equipped with 25G, 50G, 100G, 200G, etc OTN/FlexO interfaces to connect with the transport network and with Ethernet interfaces to connect with the customer equipment (CE). sdCNEs are located in data centers and are equiped with 100G, 200G, 400G, etc OTN/FlexO interfaces to connect with the transport network and optionally with Ethernet interfaces to connect with compute and storage functions in the data center.

Optical transport network slices can have a local, regional, national, continental, intercontinental or global reach due to the inherent multi-carrier nature of the ODUk and ODUflex specifications.

Maarten

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