In the 5G era, what data centers do carriers need ?, 5G data center

In the 5G era, what data centers do carriers need ?, 5G data center

Mobile communication networks evolve every ten years. With the arrival of 2018, the masses are one step closer to the 5G era. However, behind this is a "war" that is invisible to the 5G era, but it has quietly started between operators.

In the 5G era, operators are on the new starting line

When talking about 5 Gbps, what people think of first is perhaps the high-speed and high-bandwidth features it brings. For example, you can download a video in one second, watch all kinds of HD videos through a mobile terminal, and transmit large documents. In fact, 5g not only increases speed.

As a new generation of mobile communication technology, 5g has features such as high speed, low latency, low power consumption, high capacity, and wide coverage. It is called a technology born of Iot ". It is foreseeable that 5G will greatly eliminate the barriers between people, things and things, as well as the connection between people and things, and effectively promote the development of Iot, at the same time, it will also lead to huge changes in the telecom industry and all walks of life.

It is worth noting that new technologies will inevitably generate new application values and new market opportunities. Gartner predicts that 5G will connect 2020 smart devices and 50 billion people by 7.7 billion. At that time, 5G will promote a large number of demands for video content delivery services, as well as new application demands such as AR, VR, self-driving, IOV, and smart home. These also represent broad market opportunities for carriers.

IT platform capability is critical

Undoubtedly, with the arrival of the 5G era, the challenges for operators are also obvious. In my opinion, 5G will challenge the capabilities of the operator's cloud platform, which includes the following aspects:

First, due to breakthroughs in data transmission bottlenecks such as bandwidth and latency, smart terminals and IOT devices are no longer limited by the computing capabilities of devices, but can leverage the power of the cloud, to obtain more powerful data processing capabilities. Therefore, it challenges the Platform service capabilities and support capabilities of the operator's cloud data center.

Secondly, with the rapid development of new services such as HD mobile video, AR, VR, self-driving, IOV, and smart home, the network is required to provide ultra-low latency and localized service processing, customization and other specific capabilities. This requires that some features of the mobile core network sink closer to the content source.

For example, advanced technologies such as self-driving have put forward high requirements for real-time data such as vehicle running status and road conditions, while maintaining frequent interaction with data centers. Therefore, these new demands will challenge the capabilities of the carrier's cloud data center.

Finally, the 5G technology will stimulate a lot of business innovation, and the increasing number of operator business types will also increase the technical complexity and management difficulty, this requires the operator to have powerful automation, management, and O & M capabilities while agile and elastic application deployment.

It is not hard to see that the arrival of the 5G era is a real challenge for telecom operators mostly from the back-end platforms. So how should telecom operators build cloud data centers for the 5G era? In Huawei's view, telecom operators need to focus on the following areas:

First, edge computing. As mentioned above, in the 5G era, Iot services such as AR, VR, and V2X have extremely high requirements on network latency and speed. Not only do you need to move the network and service processing functions down to a location close to the access network, but also provide higher requirements for computing and forwarding capabilities. Edge computing can undoubtedly meet the needs.

Second, smart engines. In the 5G era, image and video recognition will emerge in Wireless Video Surveillance scenarios. In IOV scenarios, the analysis of vehicle GPS Position Tracking and driving behavior preference will emerge, congestion, violation detection, traffic light Optimization in intelligent traffic scenarios, group density and mobile model prediction in smart city scenarios, and power usage distribution and peak forecast in smart grid scenarios. The above "Intelligent engine" for 5G IoT scenarios requires the cloud data center to rely on the IoT data lake aggregated by the big data platform, it further provides comprehensive and pre-integrated basic platform services such as mainstream machine learning, deep learning, graph engine, and search algorithm in the industry.

Third, more efficient hardware. 5G puts forward more than 100 times faster speed and bandwidth requirements than 4G networks, and more demanding demands for reliability and latency assurance, in order to meet the needs of future virtual reality, ultra-HD video, intelligent manufacturing, automatic driving and other typical industry application scenarios. Therefore, in strict compliance with industry standards, open service APIs and ecosystems can meet the high network throughput, high concurrency computing, and storage I/O requirements of 5G networks and services for cloud platforms, achieving the optimal performance and cost of the cloud data center has become a touchstone to measure the competitiveness of the cloud data center in the 5G era.

5G has arrived, and operators need to accelerate the technical layout to seize the lead.