Software Operators as the Key to Private 5G

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31 Jan 2022, Sophia-Antipolis, FR, Alireza Mohammadi

Software Operators as the Key to Private 5G

With the new use cases that are considered in 5G, new enterprises would be capable of utilizing 5G for their private networking. In most cases, these new enterprises are not expected to have investments on neither the infrastructure nor the human resources to operate their private 5G network. Let alone, for 5G to cover the vast range of use-cases that it is intended for, it had to become considerably complicated with dozens of parameters on each core of the network. Even though this means flexibility at its extremes, tailoring such a network demands intelligence while given the dynamics of the requirements and resources it should be incorporated with observations.

In a more traditional and outdated approach, the aforementioned intelligence would be harvested from large group of human operators and engineers. However, humans have proven to fail against machines both in terms of expenditure and outcome, when the problem scales. In short, a software operator would be able to yield substantial better deployments while continuously carrying out tasks on the network to compensate with the dynamics of the environment.

Furthermore, 5G addresses the issue of infrastructure cost by standardizing concepts such as software networks, virtualized radio access, and cloud-native deployments. This echoes the same tradeoff between the flexibility and complexity which again could be inexpensively tackled with an intelligent software operator with a continuous observability stack.

Why Trirematics operator?

Trirematics operator is the realization of the denoted intelligent software operator. Regardless of the deployment environment, whether cloud-native, virtualized, bare-metal, single-node, clustered, or multi-sited, it integrates seamlessly with various 4G/5G use-cases. The abstraction within its design hides the complexities we mentioned earlier, while providing enough diagnosis and control through its observability stack.

Beyond the previous discussion, we have recognized the demand for End-to-End (E2E) deployments where the user equipments should be considered in the decision-taking loops. Trirematics operator provides its features across the whole E2E connection in a consistent manner, regardless of the choice of the environment or the hardware and network applications. This consistency enables seamless transitions between design options at any time while getting the same experience with predictable outcomes.

Despite its unique, long list of features, Trirematics should not be regarded as a solid, heavy, closed toolset, but rather a rich, extensible framework, where the enterprises could build their custom control loops or observability stacks, while depending on the core functionalities provided by the Trirematics operator. Indeed, the premium features of the operator are exposed independently and orthogonally on the operator plane that is provided through the framework. This mindset strongly aligns with practices of DevOps by which the new updates to the network and its software will form shorter cycles which would ensure security and stability, accelerate innovation, and shorten the value to market chain.

What are the features of Trirematics operator?

We believe given the core features of Trirematics operator, it should be regarded as a necessity not a luxury for most of the use-cases in private 5G. A short list of these features is given as the following:

  1. Intelligence and Agility: Trirematics operator offers intelligence wherever a decision has to be made in the deployment, including day-1 operations such as placement, resource allocation, and deployment and day-2 operations such as migration, fault recovery, parameter reconfiguration, and continuous optimization. All of those decisions are optimized to be agile as well.
  2. Automation and Abstraction: Our operator automates the lifecycle of the network entities beyond what could be achieved by general-purpose automations. While depending on the environment, the operator would rely on those automations, it adds a telco-oriented outlook and semantic that expands beyond the mere processes or containers that have been deployed and resembles a practical, abstracted representation of the E2E network.
  3. Maintenance and Observability: Once a 4G/5G network has been deployed, it is expected to work reliably for long periods of time. The Trirematics operator could perform automated day-0, day-1, and day-2 operations with extensive observability features ranging from log processing, alerting, metric processing, and health monitoring.
  4. Customization and Multi-x: Trirematics is highly customizable and has inherited support for multi-x. Look to our other blog post for more info about multi-x.

How one could utilize Trirematics operator?

Trirematics operator is included in all of our solutions with different flavors and specific features related to that product. In particular, all of them would offer the basic operator functionalities in the operator plane and the extensibility that comes with it. In particular, the following table shows the extra features that has been added via the operator plane on each product to support the features of that particular solution.

Extended operator Product Extra features
DevOps Operator MX-PDK CI/CD, validation, and testing
Slicing Operator MX-PRO Slice management and observability
Terminal Operator MX-PRO E2E control and observability
MLOps Operator MX-PRO Machine Learning integration
SecOps Operator MX-PRO Security and policy enforcement integration
Mesh Operator MX-HUB Advanced networking and meshing features
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