Page 27 - 5G Basics - Core Network Aspects

Core network aspects 1

which are trying to create new network architectures based on contents/data new information and
information management model, see [b-NETINF] and [b-Dannewitz].

I.3 Energy-saving of networks (energy consumption)

Reduction of energy consumption is extremely important with regard to environmental awareness and
network operation. This includes a variety of device-level, equipment-level, and network-level technologies
[b-Gupa]. Each technology, whether at the same or different levels, should not work independently, but
should cooperate with the others and provide a total solution that minimizes total energy consumption.
Energy-saving of networks has the following three promising areas:
– Forward traffic with less power
Existing data transmission is usually carried out with power-consuming devices and equipment, and
their energy consumption depends mainly on their transmission rate. Energy-saving technologies
enable to achieve the same rate with less power using low-power devices/equipment, photonic
switching, lightweight protocols, and so on [b-Baliga2007], and thus reduce the energy consumed
per bit transmitted.
– Control device/equipment operation for traffic dynamics

Existing network devices or systems continually operate at full specification and full speed. On the
contrary, networks with energy-saving technologies will control operations based on the traffic,
using methods such as sleep mode control, dynamic voltage scaling, and dynamic clock operation
technique [b-Chabarek]. This reduces the total energy consumption needed.

– Satisfy customer requests with minimum traffic
Existing networks typically have not paid attention to the total amount of traffic to satisfy customer
requests. Networks with energy-saving technologies, however, will satisfy requests with minimum
traffic. That is, they can reduce inessential or invalid traffic such as excessive keep-alive messages
or duplicated user messages, by using multicasting, filtering, caching, redirecting, and so on. They
reduce traffic and hence reduce the total energy consumption needed.
Based on these characteristics, energy-saving of networks can reduce total power consumption, and serve
as a solution to environmental issues from a network perspective. A newly implemented service may increase
energy consumption, but networks with energy-saving technologies can mitigate this increase. Compared
with cases having no energy-saving technologies, overall energy consumption may even be able to be
reduced.

I.4 In-system network management (network management)
Due to limitations of today's network management operations, a new decentralized network management
approach, called in-system management, is being developed [b-MANA], and [b-UniverSELF]. In-system
management employs decentralization, self-organization, autonomy, and autonomicity as its basic enabling
concepts. The idea is that, contrary to the legacy approach, the management tasks are embedded in the
network and, as such, empower the network to control complexity. The FN as a managed system now
executes management functions on its own. The following are features of the in-system management for FN.
In the future, networks will be large-scale and complicated for supporting various services with different
characteristics, such as bandwidth and QoS, so network infrastructure and network service management will
become more complicated and difficult. Various approaches have previously been proposed for
standardizing the network management system by defining the common interface for the operation system,
such as the service-oriented architecture (SOA) concept, but have not been operated due to problems such
as cost. This will worsen worse in the future due to the proliferation of different management systems caused
by increasing services, so high-efficiency operations and management technologies are needed. Also,
because current network operations and management depend mainly on the skills of the network manager,
facilitating network management tasks and passing on workers' knowledge are significant problems.
There are two candidate functions to achieve these goals.

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