Chapter 7: Cloudification of Access

The previous chapters went step-by-step, first breaking 5G down into its elemental components and then showing how those components could be put back together using best practices in cloud design to build a fully functional, 3GPP-compliant 5G cellular network. In doing so, it is easy to lose sight of the big picture, which is that the cellular network is undergoing a dramatic transformation. That’s the whole point of 5G. We conclude by making some observations about this big picture.

To understand the impact, it is helpful to first understand what’s important about the cloud. The cloud has fundamentally changed the way we compute, and more importantly, the pace of innovation. It has done this through a combination of:

  • Disaggregation: Breaking vertically integrated systems into independent components with open interfaces.
  • Virtualization: Being able to run multiple independent copies of those components on a common hardware platform.
  • Commoditization: Being able to elastically scale those virtual components across commodity hardware bricks as workload dictates.

There is an opportunity for the same to happen with the access network, or from another perspective, for the cloud to essentially expand so far as to subsume the access network.

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Figure 7.1: A multi-tenant / multi-cloud—including virtualized RAN resources alongside conventional compute, storage, and network resources—hosting both Telco and Over-the-Top (OTT) services and applications.

Figure 7.1 gives a high-level overview of how the transformation might play out, with the global cloud spanning edge clouds, private Telco clouds, and the familiar public clouds. Each individual cloud site is potentially owned by a different organization (this includes the cell towers, as well), and as a consequence, each site will likely be multi-tenant in that it is able to host (and isolate) applications on behalf of many other people and organizations. Those applications, in turn, will include a combination of the RAN and Core services (as described throughout this book), Over-the-Top (OTT) applications commonly found today in public clouds (but now also distributed across edge clouds), and new Telco-managed applications (also distributed across centralized and edge locations).

Eventually, we can expect common APIs to emerge, lowering the barrier for anyone (not just today’s network operators or cloud providers) to deploy applications across multiple sites by acquiring the storage, compute, networking, and connectivity resources they need.