Even though networks are implemented as software since a very long time, the current paradigm change seems to have a similar impact as the all-IP networks once had for 4G. Because of this, the development perspective for the new systems has to adapt and to integrate the paradigms coming from the IT industry while being able to answer to the specific telecom requirements.
This tutorial will address the topic in a coherent manner across the different networking domains as reflected in the current advancements towards 5G networks. After setting down the impact of “everything is software" and the specific functional responsibilities towards the 5G software provider systems. A detailed impact on the different areas of the 5G system is provided including radio, edge, core, backhaul, management and application integration.
Following, an assessment of the 5G system standards evolution is presented especially concentrating on the major differences from the 4G system as well as carefully analyzing the impact and needed customizations in order to be able to address the requirements of the different  use cases including extended mobile broadband and multimedia delivery, massive IoT connectivity, ultra-low latency and high reliability use cases, industrial communications, vehicular communication, satellite and wireless backhauls with specific new use cases and the corresponding architectural blueprints.
The tutorial concludes with outlining how the new software technology can be brought in a relevant manner to the 5G research and especially product development, the status of the current R&D and in general the maturity of the 5G ecosystem. Furthermore, the software toolkits and experimentation platforms of Fraunhofer FOKUS/TU Berlin will be introduced, namely Open5GCore, Open5GMTC, OpenSDNCore, the 5G Playground as enabler for demonstrations and hands-on know-how accumulation and comprehensive prototyping in the context of academic and industry research and the 5G Ready Trial Platform as the main vehicle for practical use case deployments and pilots towards the vertical markets.
The tutorial will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the software revolution – the year 2017 perspective
• Standardization advancements towards a 5G system including vehicular, critical infrastructures and IoT support
• Integration with enabling technologies: SDN and NFV
• Network management for 5G environments
• Total convergence: satellite, machine learning and connecting any devices
• Impact of the vertical markets towards the 5G system standardization
• Best practice developments of software networks towards the R&D and pilot use cases.

However, cloudifying (making it cloud-ready) a Network Function, providing modularity, scalability, etc., requires a re-design process. With the novel paradigm of everything as a software, Cloud Native approaches and Microservices architectural principles are influencing the way network functions are designed, developed and orchestrated across heterogeneous infrastructure resources. Virtualization as well as Cloudification of Network Functions is crucial for Next Generation Network Infrastructures.

Cloud-Native Network Functions requires a different kind of management system for being orchestrated. Having a common Management and Orchestration (MANO), as defined by the ETSI NFV, layer across different network operators’ Point of Presence  is crucial for having a single view of the infrastructure resources. Considering the increasing interest towards deployments at the Edge of the Network foreseen by the Multi-access Edge Computing and Fog Computing initiatives, requires flexible MANO systems for dynamically orchestrating resources. Legacy approaches are no longer suitable when moving towards virtualization. Novel technologies like OpenStack, representing one of the fundamental components in the Infrastructure as a Service domain, provides on-demand compute, storage and networking resources. However, those resources needs to be orchestrated in order to provide the required networking services. Last but not least, the always increasing momentum gained by containers technologies, like Docker and Kubernates, is paving the way to the so called Functions (or even processes) as a Service concepts. Executing functions when they are needed, provides innovative mechanisms for orchestrating resources.

This tutorial, will walk through those topics presented in a coherent manner. First of all, several use cases coming from the 5G and IoT domain will be presented. Network Slicing in 5G, Edge Computing, IoT, need to be analysed for addressing requirements at the infrastructure level. An overview about Cloud-Native applications principles and microservices approaches will be given. Those principles are the basis for building highly reliable network services in each of those use cases.

The tutorial continues moving towards the virtualization domain: a comparison between virtual machines (VMs) vs containers will be provided. In particular, the main focus will be on motivating the usage of VMs and containers for particular use cases. Technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, OpenStack will be presented and analysed.

One of the biggest part of the tutorial will be dedicated to the MANO domain, representing the crucial component in Next Generation Network Infrastructures. The requirements set by the presented use cases are crucial for understanding functionalities needed on this layer. The different components (Orchestrators, Managers) will be deeply discussed and analysed. An overview about the existing MANO technologies will be given: OpenSourceMANO, ONAP, Open Baton are just few examples implementing NFV MANO. A more detailed overview about Open Baton will be given. In particular, it will be highlighted its functionalities provided, and particular attention will be given to the design decisions which have driven its implementation. Its roadmap will be presented.  

The tutorial concludes with a hands-on session: bootstrap your virtualization environment in 5 minutes. People from the audience who would like to get started immediately, could make use of this session to bootstrap a NFV/MEC based environment on their own laptops.

In summary, the tutorial will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the Network Virtualization transformation
• Cloud-Native principles and microservices architectural approaches  
• Virtualization technologies
• Management and Orchestration for NFV and MEC
• Open Baton as reference MANO framework
• Bootstrap your virtualization environment in 5 minutes