A lot of 5G’s hopes and expectations seem to pin on the potential of 5G network slicing. And it’s no wonder. According to ABI Research, revenue from 5G network slicing is expected to grow from $309 Million in 2022 to US$19.5 Billion in 2028. According to Heavy Reading, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) will try to capture this opportunity by targeting service-based and vertical-specific use cases for their network slice offerings. Service-based use cases, such as connected cars, IoT, and smart homes, and vertical-specific use cases, such as utilities and industry 4.0, both have low latency, high volume, and high-reliability requirements in common – which network slices will be well suited for. However, CSPs are running the risk of dropping the ‘network slice’ ball if they rely on their legacy service assurance platforms.
This is because legacy service assurance tools were built for simpler networks and will likely struggle under the complexity and demands of 5G and new emerging business models. This sentiment is shared by respondents to the aforementioned Heavy Reading report, where 43% acknowledge that 5G network slicing will require a ‘major change’ to their service assurance platform to support SLA-based service delivery and monetization.
Traditionally, service assurance is used to identify where and why a service is not meeting its performance requirements. With network slices, service assurance will be particularly important as network slices will carry stringent SLAs and service performance will have to be continuously monitored for each customer and assessed against contractual commitments. In other words, service assurance will make or break network slice monetization. This means that service assurance will need major changes in these key areas:
- SLA assurance for proactive monitoring
- SLA assurance for slice fault analysis
- SLA assurance for slice optimization
Passive monitoring alone is no longer effective or cost-scalable when managing network slices. Instead, SLA assurance requires monitoring solutions that combine multiple sources of data (such as synthetic traffic measurements, customer experience KPIs, and network health KPIs) and, additionally, uses sequential automated testing. This enables CSPs to generate performance scorecards per network slice, drill down for detailed KPI analysis and troubleshooting, and ensure that any degradation in slice performance is detected before impacting the service or customer.
Active testing is especially suited for evaluating the slice performance when the network slice is first instantiated and there is no user traffic. Furthermore, periodic active tests during the lifetime of a network slice will ensure that any degradation in slice performance is detected before impacting the service or customer. Also in the event of a fault active testing and node emulation can be used to segment a fault to specific areas of the network or even down to a particular network element. The combination of passive data and network element information with controlled synthetic data generated through active testing can deliver a 360-degree picture of the fault, leading to faster Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) and requiring fewer resources.
Additionally, to ensure network quality and customer quality of experience is delivered, network slices need continuous optimization. To do so, service assurance solutions need to provide cross-correlation analysis across the network, user KPIs, and service KPIs to deliver detailed insights on service quality from both a customer experience and network performance perspective.
It’s time to get practical about successful network slicing based services. A 5G Active Testing Platform ensures that network slices provide the right SLA from the time they are configured and throughout their lifetime. It provides the active monitoring, testing, fault analysis, and optimization capabilities needed for CSPs to monitor customer experience, verify business impacts, and detect increasingly difficult to diagnose network errors, while guaranteeing an overall enhanced network quality which will be the foundation to monetize network slices. Additionally, operators should look for deep network analytics solutions that provide passive network observability together with the ability to scale up to monitor large networks, with millions of subscribers, but also scale down to assure edge deployments like private networks.
In Mobileum, we’ve built our Testing and Service Assurance portfolio with this in mind, combining active monitoring, testing, fault analysis, and optimization capabilities needed for CSPs to monitor customer experience, verify business impacts, and detect increasingly difficult to diagnose network errors, while guaranteeing an overall enhanced network quality which will be the foundation to monetize network slices.
Learn more about Mobileum 5G Testing and Deep Network Analytics product suite or contact us to get your service assurance capabilities ready for the network slice era.
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