A 5G service assurance solution should provide insights that can drive smart fulfillment, self-scaling, and self-healing actions. Such end-to-end closed-loop assurance will eventually lead to zero-touch and self-service operations that enable scalability and reduce error, time and effort, and operational costs.

Zero-touch can only happen through extensive use of automation, sophisticated analytics and contextual decision-making driven by AIOps, unsupervised machine learning, supervised event correlation, and topological root cause analysis. These are the essential capabilities of 5G service assurance.

A hyperscale architecture enabled by microservices is critical to address 5G’s assurance challenges. By replacing operating system virtual machines with containers, microservice applications can support extremely high levels of scale with far less dedicated hardware. And microservice components and integrations can be developed and deployed quickly.

Machine learning and microservices capabilities are designed to handle and automate 5G and IoT’s explosion of data and real-time response time requirements, both of which surpass human processing ability.

These are just some of the fundamental impacts of 5G on operations and service assurance. It all comes down to proactive and automated assurance in real-time that focuses on actionable insights to enable contextual decision-making at speed and at scale.

Moving forward with 5G service assurance

Operators are becoming increasingly dependent on their networks to provide services anytime, anywhere. They want to capitalize on the business opportunities created by cloud, 5G, SDN and NFV, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI) and ML technologies to deliver new services—but they have been challenged by the increased complexity of integrating these new technologies into their existing networks, as well as by higher customer expectations.

To address these challenges while modernizing and future-proofing the business, operators are moving toward assurance solutions that provide data-driven actionable insights and automate the way the network identifies and resolves service-impacting incidents in real-time.

Operators can move forward by deploying a unified 5G assurance solution that can act as a manager of managers to consolidate NOCs as well as legacy tools that can’t meet the business needs and scale of today’s networks. This solution should be built on a scalable platform that provides the capabilities highlighted above.

The 5G assurance solution can be deployed in a phased approach, acting in a way that is comparable to a city planning strategy, where valuable legacy assets can be preserved while new assets are being added, but all coherently linked based on an overall plan and architecture—and with lower overall impact and risk.

This approach can also bring benefits to operators at every step as it migrates from 4G LTE to 4G LTE with 5G RAN, and then to 5G standalone.

Service assurance provides critical capabilities for 5G

A next-generation unified and holistic service assurance platform that puts service quality—what the customer wants—first is essential for 5G. It should support 5G’s need for real-time operations and scalability, while at the same time enabling new revenues and providing cost efficiencies.

5G services must be monitored and managed to perform well all the time, no matter the complexity of the environment. If failures occur, services must be brought back to an operational state with speed and accuracy through closed loop automation, thus reducing downtime.

Critical capabilities include a hyperscale architecture for scalability and AI and ML to automatically manage 5G’s wealth of data in real time and to provide closed-loop assurance automation.

Such a next-generation service assurance solution is essential for the 5G era.