The progression toward commercial deployment of 5G is set for 2020. Verizon has already announced the first commercial trials for 2017, resulting in a worldwide race amongst CSPs towards 5G.
Alongside 5G, operations management is an increasingly important topic for telcos to explore. It is therefore important to understand how 5G will change the OSS landscape.
With new management layers being introduced, the complexity of managing 5G operations is increased. In contrast to legacy operations management layers, 5G will have NSPs and CSPs, allowing multiple virtual CSPs over a single NSP. There could be multiple network slices on top of each CSP to deliver differentiated 5G services (uRLLC, eMBB, mIOT).
There are various potential changes in the future 5G operations management, some of which are listed below
Data Models
New data models are required in order to accommodate the new management layers.
Planning and Fulfillment
To deliver differentiated 5G services, new functionalities will be required within planning and fulfilment to on-board, create, instantiate, configure and active/deactivate the network slices and pairing functions. This includes uRLLC for ultra-low latency autonomous vehicle services, eMBB for bandwidth hungry video streaming and VR, AR and mIoT for connected factories applications.
Assurance
As heaps of data begin to generate from the range of services provisioned to differentiated network slices, it poses various challenges to assure these services. Prioritising latency and reliability KPIs for the uRLLC network slice to deliver services like autonomous vehicles. Bandwidth KPI would take on a higher priority for eMBB network slice by delivering video streaming applications.
Closed Loop Automation
Scaling network slices becomes very important as network slicing moves into full production mode. To fully exploit this crucial scaling process, operators need to automate the process by triggering scaling up/down/in/out operations based on the utilisation KPIs of different resources taking part in a network slice.
Customer Experience Management and Analytics
5G will introduce new business models and create new sources of revenue, mainly for B2B and B2B2C companies. This will result in more diverse services and industry verticals generating large volumes of data, which will require their CEM to be tailored to their particular business models.