Page 65 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2022

TOWARDS A MORE FLEXIBLE NETWORKING LANDSCAPE

David Lou ; Marinos Charalambides
1
2
1 zhe.lou@huawei.com Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH

2 marinos.charalambides@gmail.com Independent Researcher

ABSTRACT To this end, the paper focuses on four key areas that can
contribute significantly towards increasing the degree of
Technological advancements leading to 5th generation flexibility for the benefit of network operators, service
networks mainly focused on improving coverage and providers and users: (i) network configuration and
performance in terms of bandwidth and latency. While these adaptability, Section 2; (ii) cloud-native networking, Section
will likely remain aspects of continuous improvement, along 3; (iii) network softwarization, Section 4; and (iv) network
with issues on reliability and security, this paper argues that addressing, Section 5. For each of these areas we present the
flexibility is a key property that 6G networks should exhibit state of play and identify the gaps, while in Section 6 we
in order to overcome important limitations of the current discuss the main challenges and research opportunities.
networking landscape and fulfill emerging user needs and
application requirements. We identify key areas that can 2. NETWORK CONFIGURATION AND
contribute towards more flexibility, present existing efforts ADAPTABILITY
on relevant technologies and discuss the research challenges
that need to be addressed in order to reach the desired level Current practices in the telecommunications domain rely on
of flexibility. long-lived configurations, e.g. in the order of days, which do
not cater for changes in the operating conditions or in the
Keywords – 6G networks, flexible Internet, network performance requirements of running services. More flexible
intelligence solutions that allow shorter configuration cycles and adapt
the network behavior accordingly are of interest to network
1. INTRODUCTION operators but also to other vertical industries operating
demanding services. The main obstacles in realizing
It is evident that network infrastructures are already hard to dynamic reconfiguration functionality in telecommunication
operate and manage [28], while emerging trends such as the networks are the centralized management platforms that are
introduction of computational capabilities at network edges in place today and the not-so-straightforward way by which
bring additional complexities. In addition, current network devices can be collectively programmed.
networking practices, architectures and technologies have
contributed in making the networking landscape rather rigid. 2.1 Network automation
As a result, demanding services in terms of performance and
reliability are difficult to deploy, the operational expenditure Although centralization simplifies the implementation of
remains high, and the integration of new technologies network management systems, it renders the automation of
sometimes requires nasty hacks that are costly in many ways. management tasks rather difficult. Due to the large
geographic footprint of operator networks, centralized
While the capacity and latency of networks continue to solutions introduce significant lag and overhead when
improve, we believe that flexibility should be a key collecting state information. In addition, algorithms that
characteristic of future networks, which deserves attention optimize for the whole network tend to be time consuming.
from the research community [27]. Making the network As such, autonomic networking principles envisioned by
more flexible will enable adaptive behavior based on many operators and vendors, in which automated decision-
emerging events, programmatic control of resources, fine- making was based on the analysis of continuously collected
grained resource management, and will extend the monitoring data, were never applied to large telco networks,
performance boundaries. Together, these can simplify the in contrast to data center networks that are characterized by
deployment and operation of new services, cut service much smaller network diameters.
deployment times drastically, reduce operational costs, and
achieve more efficient use of resources.

978-92-61-36151-8/CFP2268P @ ITU 2022 – 19 – Kaleidoscope