Francisco Fontes, from the Technology and Innovation Strategy department, was a speaker at the Think Twice event on the 6th March at the University of Aveiro with the lecture “5G and Network Softwarization”. Think Twice is a Hackathon-style programming competition where the participating teams, of 3 elements each, focus on solving challenges and proposed projects.
Francisco Fontes’ presentation explored the main aspects of networks softwarization, the architecture and characteristics of 5G, and how they come together to respond to a set of new use cases, especially for industry. He emphasized that electronic communications networks are experiencing an increasing softwarization, with functions previously performed by specific hardware and software, to be replaced by software to be executed on COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) servers. In addition to reducing investment and operating costs, this brings flexibility and agility.
Although the operationalization of 5G does not require this softwarization, the full potential of the 5th generation of mobile communications will only be achieved with these two characteristics to be guaranteed by technological solutions such as NFV (Network Functions Virtualization) and SDN (Software Defined Networks). An efficient dataplane (the dataplane is part of the network through which users’ packages are sent), dynamic slice management, application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, are only feasible based on NFV and SDN.