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.