The telecom industry is advancing rapidly from bare metal toward 5G cloud-native networks. Historically, wireless technology evolution has concentrated on improving RAN speed to enable the delivery of quick and secure data. The transition to 5G is more revolutionary than evolution. It promises to transform “dumb pipes” into a massively scalable, high-speed, and low-latency service delivery platform, enabling diverse applications such as autonomous cars, smart grids, industrialized robotics, and more.
The goal of 5G is to cost-effectively deliver Extreme Mobile Broadband, Massive Machine Communication, and Critical Machine Communication. To meet the requirements for scale, throughput, latency, and reliability, 5G architecture has adopted Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and cloud implementation to streamline network and service deployment, operations, and management.
This disruptive journey towards 5G is well underway and includes several distinct stages with gradual transitions between them.
Allot Leads the NFV Way
Throughout the 5G journey to Cloud Native, intelligent functionality such as traffic management, service/user aware optimization, and security will continue to be of critical importance.
Allot embraced this journey and re-architected its software to be fully NFV compliant, implementing the following technologies:
- Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS)
- Stateless vs. Stateful components
- Microservice-based architecture vs. monolithic solutions
- Container-based deployment vs. VM-based
- Full Life Cycle Management with integration to leading Orchestrators
- Continuous integration / continuous delivery (CICD) of all functionality
Real-life NFV Deployments at Tier-1 Operators
Allot Smart and Allot Secure solutions already support business-critical scenarios in Tier-1 fixed and mobile NFV networks:
QoE cannot be taken for granted
Despite the scale, 5G resources are finite and require optimization when congested. QoE-sensitive services and applications must be intelligently prioritized to ensure customer QoE. Even software-defined slices, architected to ensure end-to-end QoS, will encounter conditions where specific applications must be prioritized over others.
Allot Smart’s NFV-compliance traffic detection functionality (TDF) will make it possible to scale-out functionality, and prioritize traffic, when and where it is needed.
Security remains critical in 5G
5G will not solve security problems; if anything, the threat landscape will grow exponentially along with the growth of bandwidth and unprotected IoT devices, reaching densities of 1M devices per km2. CSPs have a tremendous opportunity to protect their own networks while monetizing mass-market, connected home and enterprise IoT security – via centrally deployed and managed cybersecurity solutions.
Allot Secure’s NFV-compliant solutions can scale to support your network at each stage of its evolution. Allot Secure will protect your network and your customers’ devices, through the network, spinning out mitigation functionality as needed, near the threat source, minimizing attack traffic within the rest of the CSP network.
Allot NFV / 5G Architecture
Allot software architecture has evolved over 20+ years of carrier-grade deployments, ranging from bare metal to virtualized and fully NFV-compliant solutions. Allot’s solutions are compatible with ETSI NFV standards, capable of running on standard appliances, as virtualized software-only elements, or fully NFV-compliant with orchestration and automation.
Our NFV-compliant platforms are further enhanced, via APIs to leading 3rd party open-source tools, to better manage and automate operations while meeting customer requirements. Allot’s complete offering can be deployed as a full suite of control plane and user plane VNFs, on cloud operating systems, such as VMware or OpenStack, supporting a range of Lifecycle Management (LCM) functions.
Orchestration
Allot supports the leading orchestration solutions to ensure optimal time-to-market and deliver end-to-end automation (Heat & TOSCA) of lifecycle management.
These solutions include:
- Ericsson ECM
- Cisco – NSO
- HP HPD
- ONAP
- Allot S-VNFM / G-VNFM
Smart and Secure
Allot recognizes that each service provider has a unique place on the NFV journey, with different requirements, architectures, and interfaces. As you continue on your path, you can be confident that Allot will go “the extra mile” to craft its network intelligence and security solutions to smoothly integrate into your network and to keep pace with your evolution toward cloud-native networking.
