Opening new revenue streams beyond connectivity with multi-CSP 5G slicing

Of all the fundamental improvements enabled by 5G, network slicing may be the most transformative. By allocating portions of the network to each industry and guaranteeing low-latency connectivity tailored to their needs, CSPs can go beyond the saturated mobile device market. New opportunities are plentiful and include mission critical services such as drone connectivity, V2X, cyber-physical control applications, and high-speed rail communications.

“CSPs can’t do this alone, though,” says Herve Bouvier, Project Director and Catalyst Champion at Orange – “many enterprise services enabled by 5G will require network coverage and capacity that spans beyond any single CSP footprint.” An additional problem is how to do this with 5G network slicing, as traditional roaming methods are not suitable for many mission-critical services – they just incur too much delay, and customer data needs to be secured, so cannot traverse a CSP partner’s network.

This is the challenge the 5G Flyers – Phase II Catalyst seeks to address. The team behind it has built a test case to showcase how mission critical services can be designed and dynamically deployed across multi-CSP networks using network slicing – this needed to be demonstrated with agile and frictionless implementation and operations, using the TMF ODA component architecture and Open APIs for ‘zero negotiation integration’.

To illustrate this, the drone industry was selected as it’s currently undergoing a major transformation: most drone services today operate in visual line of sight (VLOS), but regulations are rapidly evolving in many countries to allow remote drone operation using beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). New requirements to operate with BVLOS will include secure management with critical low latency and very high service availability.

This mission critical use case necessitates the use of 5G slicing to provide highly reliable 5G connectivity and ultra-responsive drone control in what promises to be a significant growth market - projected to increase from $8.15 billion in 2022 to $47.38 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 28.58%. With the combination of 5G slicing and multi-CSP networks, new mission critical services can be adopted including surveillance and monitoring (such as inspections of infrastructure, premises, and fires) and delivery (such as medical supplies to remote areas and routine mail-order services).

The project will map and assess ways in which slices across multiple CSP (or NetCo) networks enhance the quality and security of BVLOS drones, and the impact this will have on the sector, adjacent sectors, and society in general. By making use of modelling and real-world scenarios, the Catalyst is identifying gaps in existing standards and exploring potential solutions – particularly in finding the most effective ways in which dynamic slice design, activation and stitching can be exploited to provide mission critical services across a broad ecosystem of players, without using traditional roaming techniques.

Achieving this will depend on a consistent quality of service (QoS) which can only be achieved by ensuring that 5G services and slices can be dynamically stitched between CSPs and will therefore necessitate sophisticated partner management solutions and new business models as well as the adoption of uniform technical and commercial standards.

The Catalyst use case is based on a renewable energy company, Green Path, which contracts a drone operator for preventative maintenance of its wind turbine and solar panel infrastructure across a large geographic area. The drone operator requests a highly reliable 5G network from the CSP to provide low latency communications for drone command and control (slice 1) and 4k live streaming video for the drone operator to view and detect faults (slice 2). Based on the drone mission and flight path, the CSP places a request to a partner NetCo for 5G network RAN slice to accommodate a coverage issue. The partner NetCo accepts the request after performing an end-to-end feasibility check and the drone communication service is ordered and fulfilled. By providing an end-to-end service in partnership with other organizations in the ecosystem, the CSP can provide dynamic connectivity with E2E QoS guarantees.

Successful completion of this Catalyst will provide valuable lessons for the rest of the industry and carve a route to wider use of multi-CSP network slicing. Doing so promises massive rewards, not only for the industry but for wider society: increased use of drones which can operate beyond line of sight will dramatically reduce the time and cost required in a range of activities. This will yield obvious benefits – boosting productivity, cutting labour costs, and significantly reducing congestion, as delivery vehicle numbers are reduced on roads, and with them delivery times.

According to Lester Thomas, Chief IT Systems Architect at Vodafone, “the most valuable outcomes include a broad and detailed exploration of the challenges and opportunities offered by 5G in enabling the provision of mission critical services – and crucially how CSPs work together to make this happen.” As the mobile and aviation industries continue to progress towards regulatory alignment at local, national, and international levels, mass deployment of commercial cellular-enabled drones seems closer than ever – and with this Catalyst set to resolve key technical and organizational barriers, horizons look brighter than ever.

Learn more here about how TM Forum supports its members in enabling sustainability impact across the telecoms industry.