It's the network: Towards better security and transport performance in 5G

摘要

Current 5G network discussion are often focusing on providing more comprehensive and integrated orchestration and management functions in order to improve “end-to-end” manageability and programmability, derived from NGMN and similar requirements. While these are important challenges, this paper takes the perspective that in order to arrive at a more powerful network, it is important to understand the pain points and the reasons for certain design choices of today's networks. Understanding the drivers for traffic management systems, middleboxes, CDNs and other application-layer overlays should be taken as a basis for analyzing 5G uses cases and their requirements. In this paper, I am making the point that many of today's business needs and the ambitious 5G use cases do call for a more powerful data forwarding plane, taking ICN as an example. Features of such a forwarding plane would include better support for heterogeneous networks (access networks and whole network deployments), multi-path communication, in-network storage and implementation of operator policies. This would help to avoid overlay silos and finally simplify network management.