5G Orchestration and Service Assurance: 2024 Heavy Reading Survey

The successful monetization of the core will, in many respects, hinge on service providers’ ability to address several unique 5G service-related requirements: Software and hardware disaggregation should enable services to run seamlessly at the edge or in a public or private cloud.

This is particularly true of 5G sliced-based services that utilize software to allocate dedicated network bandwidth and resources on shared 5G and cloud infrastructure to ensure low latency performance instead of simply adopting a “best effort” approach.
To meet these new requirements, service providers must be able to support the complex and multi-domain interworking model that such services employ.
It is a significant challenge to manage and orchestrate the lifecycle of disaggregated services that operate in multiple domains with low latency budgets.

To address this, 5G networks are now adopting an “end-to-end” orchestration model that utilizes automation to provide essential insight into individual service performance and lifecycle.

Similarly, the industry is also examining how automation and programmable software policies can augment existing service assurance capabilities. The goal is to ensure that network monitoring can implement closed-loop feedback to respond dynamically and in real time to changes in network performance levels that could degrade the performance of sliced- and non-slice-based services.

To understand the impacts and document the steps service providers are taking to implement end-to-end orchestration and evolve their service assurance platforms, Heavy Reading partnered with Amdocs and Cisco to develop a 20-question web-based survey that was fielded in March 2024.

This white paper presents the key findings and detailed data trends for each question.

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Amdocs and Cisco