5G for emergency services: Slicing through the complexity

The world is experiencing an increase in extreme weather events, and 5G can play an important role in emergency responses to them. A new TM Forum Catalyst is exploring how communications service providers (CSPs) can use the technology to support these critical services for public safety.

During extreme weather events, emergency responses are coordinated across silos of data – information from transportation, utilities, city services, weather tracking systems, first responders, social media, CCTV cameras and more is vital and needs to be synchronized. Thanks to new capabilities unlocked by 5G, CSPs will now be able to provide dedicated services to ensure that even in storm conditions some level of communication can still be delivered for the priority services essential to managing the event response.

A TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept is going beyond the theoretical to map out how this will work in action. The aptly named 5G Riders on the Storm team is exploring a dynamic scenario such as a flooding event or storm, which has created unexpected demand or an outage on the network. The team will demonstrate a solution that supports all the parties involved (the ‘riders’) in responding to the event (the ‘storm’) including meteorological systems and a smart city operations center.

The team is also looking at how 5G’s unique capabilities can guarantee that network services used by medical or any other mission-critical industries are not interrupted by surges or outages.

Slicing the network

One of these key capabilities of 5G is the ability to ‘slice’ the network. Network slicing allows a physical network to be divided into multiple virtual networks, enabling operators to provision the right ‘slice’ depending on the requirements of the use case.

This flexibility creates opportunities for new business models and revenue opportunities but it also adds complexity.

As 5G ramps up, more and more use cases will be realized, and operators will need to understand the network slice requirements to provision the service and meet service level agreements (SLAs). Creating a new slice specification for every single use case will soon become unwieldy, so the industry needs to take a more templated approach to standardize the information and take into account the commonalities across different use cases.

These templates will be used by vendors, mobile network operators and customers ordering slices to describe and deliver services.

The Catalyst team is working to describe the slice template for emergency services in a scenario such as this. They are also developing the end-to-end framework that efficiently manages 5G services, including management functions such as service ordering, service orchestration, resource orchestration, SLA monitoring and general assurance. Says Kevin McDonnell, a Senior Director in the Ireland Research Centre, Huawei (one of the companies taking part in the Catalyst):

“Operators are telling us that the market success of slicing will be tied to how simple and useable a slice is. Ordering and consuming slices needs to be as frictionless as possible, and standardized slice templates and slice APIs are important in making that happen.”

A template for success

Groundwork has already been done on slice templates. For example, 3GPP’s Slice/Service Type (SST) describes a network slice in terms of features and services. Standardized SSTs are used to identify slices uniquely around the world. GSMA is now working to reflect slice requirements in business and service terms, going beyond just the technical.

It is creating a Generic Slice template (GST), a set of attributes (for example, supported throughput, supported functionality, APIs, etc.) that characterize a slice. This contains the attribute names, definitions and units. A NEST (Network Slice Type) is a GST filled with values and/or ranges based on specific vertical industry use cases and defines the characteristics of the network slice.

The 5G Riders on the Storm team will supply a NEST back to the GSMA based on its use case. The team hopes to lay the groundwork for the more detailed slice templates that will follow, which go beyond information about the number of slices required and the timing, etc. to also describe how the slice can be configured and the services managed end-to-end in a live network.

They are also working with ONAP (Open Networking Automation Platform) to validate how external systems can integrate and work together with ONAP to provide the overall ecosystem. ONAP is an open source networking project hosted by the Linux Foundation to develop a widely used platform for orchestrating and automating physical and virtual network elements, with full lifecycle management.

“Now that there is a bit more maturity in the 5G standards, people are really looking to see how to practically do these use case,” says Yuval Stein, AVP, Technologies, TEOCO and the Catalyst team leader. “We've chosen to take one specific use case and do it as well as possible with all the small details of how we think this storm use case will look in reality.”

He adds: “The detailed use cases that will be presented in this Catalyst may help service providers planning similar real-life use cases, both from a high-level design perspective and for the technical aspects involved with the OSS & BSS systems that are required. The Catalyst will be focusing on extreme weather use cases and their practical impacts on the 5G network at both the business level and the slice management and orchestration level.”

The team will use TM Forum’s Information Model (also known as SID) to map customer needs to detailed network requirements. It will deploy TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) – a vision of a more agile replacement for traditional OSS/BSS architectures – and will also contribute back to it, particularly in terms of API requirements.

Collaboration

TM Forum Catalysts bring together companies to create innovative solutions to common challenges. Champions bring a business challenge that they need to solve, and each offers a unique angle based on their geography, strategy and more. The champions for this Catalyst are BT, KDDI, Orange, Telecom Austria Group, Telecom Italia and Telenor.

Champions work alongside the Catalyst participants, who each provide a technical piece of the solution. In this case:

• Netcracker provides the order management business layer as well as a service orchestration system.


• Accenture and Incognito are collaborating on an ONAP- based resource orchestration system.


• TEOCO provides service-assurance and analytics and Gen-E provides advanced geo-analytics.


• In addition to providing the network infrastructure and management layers, Huawei provides network slice lifecycle management and APIs to assure SLA objectives set by each service.

The Catalyst is a new standalone project, but it builds on the work of previous projects, including 5G Intelligent Service Operations and 5G Intelligent Service Planning and Optimization.

At Digital Transformation World the Catalyst team showed the detailed slice template and brought the scenario to life in a smart city setting using water level sensors and a visualization of how the network can react to these events.

Learn more by watching this video filmed at the event: