5G and the Cloud

5G is being developed for an extremely mobile and hyper-connected society and to accommodate the need for emerging use-cases and business models. The evolution from Fourth Generation (4G) to Fifth Generation (5G) is significant and unlike previous evolution journeys for Communication Service Providers (CSP). 5G is not only affecting the consumer, enterprise and industrial space with new use cases and business cases allowed by enhanced capabilities, it’s also encouraging operators and vendors to re-think and re-architect how the network will be built and managed.

To accommodate the myriad of divergent use-cases proposed in 5G, it is imperative that the network should be architected for inherent flexibility and efficiency. This might be accomplished by making network functions modular so that they can be quickly deployed and scaled on demand to provide service agility and cost-effectiveness. Cost-effectiveness can be achieved in cloud native paradign by the efficient binpacking in the containers, more fault tolerance and deployment flexibilities. Efforts in this direction were started by adoption of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) related technologies to make Mobile Core (MC) applications cloud ready.