Ericsson Technology Review 2022 issue 1

Ericsson CTO Erik Ekudden’s view on the key role 5G networks will play

Resilient, high-performance 5G networks will play an essential role in boosting economic growth, creating a host of new opportunities and improving market competitiveness in the years ahead. Achieving the high degree of interoperability needed to deliver the full financial and technological potential of this powerful innovation platform requires that stakeholders across industries, tech ecosystems and governments work more closely together than ever before.

This issue of our magazine includes seven articles that I believe will be of interest to anyone who wants to gain greater insight into the role that 5G networks play in the accelerating digital transformation. For example, readers who want to know about 5G service automation should go directly to page 44, where our experts explain the critical role of service exposure and automated life-cycle management in scenarios that involve private and public clouds provided by hyperscale cloud providers (HCPs). The authors also explain how CSPs can create offerings for enterprises and application developers using service management APIs, network services and assets provided by HCPs.

On page 78, readers will find a fascinating article about an end-to-end (E2E) slice orchestrator that uses transport awareness to guarantee a wide range of QoS levels, including the very high ones that are necessary to meet the most stringent requirements. By automatically matching the particular service requirements of an industry-vertical use case to its specific deployment areas, the transport-aware network slicing orchestration solution they have created ensures E2E QoS without over-provisioning.

Those who want to learn more about network robustness should turn to page 20, where our experts on the topic present what they call the ‘5G System robustness toolbox’, which consists of both standardized and vendor-specific network features and mechanisms. The great thing about this toolbox is that network operators have full flexibility to activate the features and mechanisms that are most appropriate for each particular use case and/or deployment variant and can even choose different mechanisms for different user equipment within a single network.

In the next-level RAN automation article on page 08, the authors present Ericsson’s data-driven approach to RAN automation, which is grounded in our comprehensive understanding of the internal workings of RAN network functions. By leveraging the natural dependencies between functionality in different domains and using artificial intelligence to solve complex automation tasks, our researchers have succeeded in creating highly autonomous RAN network functions that can be deployed in a wide variety of environments.

Readers who want to know more about what’s coming in 3GPP releases 17 and 18 should definitely check out the article on page 56, which highlights the most notable enhancements and new features. The final two articles in this issue explore the benefits of Massive MIMO (page 68) and the potential risks of quantum technology (page 32) – I highly recommend them both.
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