EXFO Infobrief: 5G Adaptive Service Assurance

The end goal for 5G is a cloud-native, service-based, fully standalone (SA) network. That’s a major undertaking, which means most operators will spend several years with a mix of 4G, 5G non-standalone (NSA) and 5G SA infrastructure. This highly diverse environment makes it challenging for them to provide the end-to-end (E2E) service assurance that their customers increasingly demand.

This infobrief takes an in-depth look at those challenges. It also describes how mobile operators can create a platform that provides end-to-end (E2E) service assurance for every step of the 5G journey, including: 

• Working with key performance indicator (KPI) and key quality indicator (KQI) sources that are spread across a multi-technology, multi-domain and multi-vendor environment, and using them to achieve a single, unified view of the entire E2E network and service topology.

• Accommodating an increasingly virtualized architecture, which creates a much larger, diverse set of variables that affect service quality, including cloud infrastructure (undercloud).

• Avoiding a “Frankenstein” service assurance platform by creating a collection of loosely coupled, modular service assurance functions.

• Leveraging AI to detect, correlate and alert service-impacting faults and anomalies, as well as avoid the paralysis of data overload from the enormous volumes of KPIs that a 5G SA service assurance solution can generate.