Has virtualization become obsolete in 5G?

Mon Aug 10 13:15:38 UTC 2020

> From: Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.com>
> Cc: adamv0025 at netconsultings.com; North American Network Operators'
> 
> 
> On 6/Aug/20 15:43, Shane Ronan wrote:
> 
> > Yes they are for 5G core.
> 
> Right, but for legacy operators, or new entrants?
> 
> If you know where we can find some info about deployment and
> experiences, that would be very interesting to read.
> 
> We've all been struggling to make Intel CPU's shift 10's, 40's and 100's of Gbps
> of revenue traffic as a routing platform, so would like to know how the
> operators are getting on with this.
> 
Mark, 
1) first you have your edge - lots of small instances that are meant to be horizontally scaled (not vertically- i.e. not 40's/100's of Gbps pushed via single Intel CPU) 
- that's your NFVI.  
- could be compute host in a DC "cloud", or in a customer office (acting as CPE), or at the rooftop of the office building i.e. (fog/edge computing) -e.g. hosting self-driving intersection apps via 5G -to your point regarding latency in metro), or in the same rack as core routers (acting as vRR), or actually inside a router as a routing engine card (hosting some containerized app).

2) Any of the compute hosts mentioned above can host one or more of any type of the network function you can think of ranging from EPG, SBC,  PBX, all the way to PE-Router, LB, FW/WAF or IDS. 

3) While inside a compute host it's CPU based forwarding, but as soon as you leave compute host's NICs there's world of solely NPU based forwarding (that's where you do 40's, 100's, or even 400's Gbps). 

4) Now how you make changes to control-planes of these NFs (i.e. virtual CPU-based NFs and physical NPU-based NFs) programmatically, that's the realm of SDN.
- If you want to do it right you do it in an abstracted declarative way (not exposing the complexity to a control program/user - but rather localizing it to a given abstraction layer)
Performing tasks like:
- Defining service topology/access control a.k.a. micro segmentation (e.g. A and B can both talk to C, but not to each other).
- Traffic engineering a.k.a. service chaining, a.k.a. network slicing (e.g. traffic type x should pas through NF A, B and C, but traffic type Y should pass only through A and C)

5) And for completeness, in the virtual world you have the task of VNF lifecycle management (cause the VNFs and virtual networks connecting them can be instantiated on demand)

adam