Le virage vers la 5G

Test and measurement solutions

Modern carrier networks are built using millions of miles of fiber optic and copper cables. And as service rates continue to climb, carriers are demanding more and more from this investment. Many customer-impacting service issues can be traced back to quality issues on a fiber or copper cable. Whether it’s something that happened during construction (dirty connectors or a bad splice) or while carrying live traffic (cable break or a patch panel misconnection) or because of degradation issues (wet copper access cables) having the right test equipment to quickly detect and diagnose issues is essential to a quick resolution. And 5G networks are no exception—in fact, given the trend toward higher bandwidth and signal quality, many issues that were not detected in existing networks may become visible as the networks are upgraded.

As the leader in handheld optical test equipment, EXFO has the products and expertise you need to ensure your networks perform flawlessly.

How EXFO helps

Service assurance solutions

For networks built using SDN/NFV, like the 5G core, end-to-end service assurance must be an essential aspect of every service. In traditional, physical networks there is a direct mapping of service topology to network topology based on fixed or deterministic routing rules and policies. An SDN/ NFV network breaks this relationship by abstracting the service layer away from the physical infrastructure. Because of this, it is no longer possible to infer service quality from network quality.

By utilizing active, end-to-end service assurance techniques carriers can have a real-time view of the service performance, regardless of how the SDN network has routed/re-routed it. Additionally, as services are migrated to new VNFs, there is no need to modify the performance monitoring since it’s built into the service itself and, there will be no gaps in key performance KPIs due to the move.

EXFO has a wide range of active service assurance solutions, including advanced analytics and topology discovery tools to make every network 100% visible and enable carriers to see issues before their customers do.

How EXFO helps

Analytics solutions

It is expected that 5G core networks will have millions of services running in thousands of network slices implemented on thousands of servers connected with millions of miles of fiber. Additionally, it is expected that many software defined network services will be highly dynamic in nature, for example with more bandwidth available during non-peak network hours or simply very short lived–days or even hours.

Networks such as this have the potential to generate billions of KPIs per day. Making sense of this volume of data and looking for anomalies or trends requires analytics. Humans are simply not up to the task. Especially necessary, due to the dynamic nature of SDN/ NFV networks, is the ability to map out service topologies in the virtual network so that service issues on independent services can be correlated to enable rapid root cause analysis.

EXFO has the analytics and topology discovery tools needed to allow a carrier’s operations team to keep the network running flawlessly.

How EXFO helps

Simulator solutions

The evolution of mobile networks to support 5G represents a significant architectural change, which was first introduced in 3GPP release 13. Verifying that the new functional elements will work as expected and not negatively impact existing services is critical for a smooth transition. Testing new functionality in a live network would be too risky and building a test network of sufficient scale would be cost prohibitive. Network simulators provide a cost-effective, flexible and reliable way for new platforms, functionality and protocols to be designed and tested, including load or stress testing. In this way, network equipment manufacturers can be sure their solutions will not negatively impact the live network or existing services.

How EXFO helps