ZTE’s Director of Wireless Standardization and Industrial Relationships Wang Xinhui said 5G standards must develop in harmony with those of the Internet of Things in order to ensure the “healthy development” of a global telecommunications ecosystem.
Speaking at the third Global 5G Event in Tokyo last week, Wang urged the industry to develop mobile broadband and IoT standards in parallel. This, he said, will help drive adoption of the technologies across industries and economic sectors. Specifically, Wang noted 5G should meet the requirements of eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband), URLLC (Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications), and mMTC (massive Machine Type Communications), and indicated increased open collaboration is necessary to build a unified system.
“2017 is a critical year for 5G,” Wang commented. “Standardization for next-generation mobile broadband and the Internet of Things should go hand-in-hand, and cooperation with industries should be enhanced. For example, it is vital for 5G to integrate with vertical applications such as the Internet of Vehicles.”
For its part, ZTE has already teamed up with major carriers like Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, SoftBank, KT Group, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom on 5G development.
And at a separate event last week – IMS World Forum – ZTE Telecom Cloud and Core Network’s IMS Chief Engineer Liu Wei laid out the foundational elements that will be necessary to deliver a 5G-oriented IMS as a service (IMSaaS) multimedia communication innovation platform. These include the adoption of microservices to achieve network function reconstruction from Network Function Silo architecture to Service Silo architecture; the use of network slicing to deliver customized services and networks-on-demand; and utilize capability exposure to achieve in-depth intervention into third-party services to control the core mobile internet value chain. Liu also noted carriers can leverage DevOps to provide microservice-based IMS network slicing with a closed-loop environment that has automatic design, automatic development, automatic deployment, and automatic operations and maintenance (O&M).
“The current standard IMS architecture is too complex and has a long deployment cycle, which cannot flexibly and efficiently meet the new on-demand customization communication needs for diverse use cases,” Liu observed. “The next generation IMS core network must be based on software defined networking/network function virtualization (SDN/NFV) cloud and be an integral part of IT innovation.”
Filed Under: 5G
