Page 1396 - 5G Basics - Core Network Aspects

3 Signalling aspects

Annex D

Signalling requirements of service/user awareness and control
(This annex forms an integral part of this Recommendation.)

D.1 Introduction
Smart pipe is the evolution target for the telecom operators' network, as it can have more powerful control
on network resources and provide differentiated services based on customers' demands. Based on smart
pipe technology, operators can reduce network construction costs by efficiently utilizing their network
resources and can increase their income by providing differentiated services for customers.

To build smart pipe, the key point is that the network can detect and differentiate services and users from
network flows, and can then allocate appropriate network resources for different users/services based on
some control policy. BNG is the important network device to perform service/user detection and control, as
it is the access point of broadband users/services.
It is important to study how to apply service/user detection and control under such architecture and what
are the corresponding signalling requirements.

D.2 Descriptions
BNG can provide the functions of user traffic analysis, service detection and dynamic control through the
interface between BNG and the service platform. Through service/user detection, BNG can divide user traffic
into different virtual pipes based on some criteria (e.g., service type, user type, TCP/IP port) and then allocate
resources and provide static/dynamic quality of service (QoS) guarantee for these virtual pipes.

The BNG resources should not only include traditional QoS resources, but all the resources which are possibly
allocated in a differentiated manner, so that the network can provide differentiated services to users
according to users' demands.

The BNG resources might include (but are not limited to):
1) The resources in BNG, including:
a) QoS queues and cache resources in line cards of BNG;
b) port bandwidth resource;
c) scheduling resources in switching queues of BNG;
d) controllable and revisable resources related to network address translation (NAT)/deep packet
inspection (DPI)/Firewall functions;
e) tunneling control resources.
2) The resources in control plane of BNG, including:

a) volume of routing table and virtual private network (VPN) routing table;
b) user management related resources;
c) volume of tunneling users;
d) media access control (MAC) table volume of layer 2 (L2) switch and L2 VPN;
e) bandwidth/number/priority of signalling session of network protocols.

The BNG can report the information of the above resource consumption situation to the service platform.
The service platform allocates the appropriate resources to different users according to users' demands,
resource consumption situations and the control policy. The allocation result can be distributed to the BNG
through the control policy distribution/communication interface.

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