However, the demand for these services together with intensifying competition to roll out services faster, will place pressure on carriers’ networks, never seen before. Many carriers will be challenged with the rigidity and complexity of their networks which limit their ability to meet customers’ needs. Instead of giving them a competitive advantage, their networks are impeding innovation and business growth. Carriers need to rethink their networks so they can support growth, deliver high service levels and reduce costs.

Networks were traditionally designed for speed rather than flexibility, but that will no longer suffice when flexible cloud-based services are becoming the norm. To gain greater agility and flexibility, carriers need to transform from traditional static, equipment-centric network planning, deployment and management to a dynamic, on-demand approach that will enable them to rapidly expand or change services to meet customer demands.

A future-oriented network puts the user experience at the heart of the network by building and implementing user- and application-aware network management policies to overcome congestion and performance issues. In addition to delivering high performance and minimizing cost, next-generation carrier networks need to be flexible, scalable, simple to manage and secure to support their businesses in the future.

Software defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) will form two critical elements of the 2020 network, enabling the telecoms industry to evolve existing networks to prepare for 5G, the IoT and increasing demand for a ROADS experience. 

Today NFV is helping carriers achieve virtualization across information, communication and technology (ICT) networks. However, virtualization is just the start. There is a long way to go towards building fully cloud-based networks. Huawei believes that carriers’ network transformation should be carried out in a three-stage approach that enables a smooth transition from legacy networks to a cloud-based NFV and SDN infrastructure. The three stages are: Virtualization, Virtualization + Automation + Orchestration, and Native Cloud.

Virtualization
Characteristics: software and hardware decoupling, NFV
Time span: From 2013 till now
With growing convergence of information technology (IT) and communications technology (CT),  many carriers have embraced IT virtualization techniques to improve network resource utilization and reduce costs. This is the initial stage of NFV development and enables network functions to be separated from underlying hardware and deployed as software on standardized platforms. This stage improves resource usage and increases O&M efficiency to scale up or down rapidly. However at this stage, the flexibility and agility of the entire network has not yet been fully realized.

Cloudification
Characteristics: Automation and orchestration on the basis of virtualization for more flexible and agile networks
Time span: From 2015 till now
Since virtualization alone cannot make full use of cloud computing on telecom networks, carriers are now decoupling the entire software system by adding automation and orchestration to achieve maximum flexibility and agility while at the same time improve resource usage and performance. The further decoupling breaks the software system down into discrete software services, including load balancing, stateless service logic processing, and distributed databases. Software services are separately deployed with flexible scheduling, which improves the resource usage of the entire system. This is a key stage for cloud transformation and accommodating the shift towards finer-granularity of software.

Cloud Native
Characteristics: microservices enabled, PaaS used to build an open capability platform for telecom networks
Time span: From 2017 till now
As software moves towards finer granularity, the entire software system will comprise a series of software microsystems delivering microservices. These microservices can be independently developed, deployed, and maintained, and can provide flexible services to meet the needs of different vertical industries. Furthermore, carriers can use platform-as-a-service (PaaS) to open their telecom network capabilities to a wide range of developers and partners, enabling real-time resource sharing and win-win collaboration among carriers, third-party developers, and end users. An open network capability ecosystem will also increase traffic for carriers through the introduction of more innovative services.

SDN and NFV are core technologies within Huawei’s SoftCOM strategy which defines the future of network architecture. Through its SoftCOM strategy, Huawei is helping carriers drive their entire network to the cloud through six critical areas: core networks, edge networks, fixed access networks, RF access networks, O&M support networks, and application services. Through Huawei’s global development experience and continuous innovation in SDN and NFV, the company has partnered with over 40 carriers around the world to deploy 30+ commercial SDN projects and 50+ commercial NFV projects. 

The majority of commercial deployment projects are on the second stage (Cloudification), which shows virtualization alone is no longer meeting the business needs of leading carriers. These carriers are collaborating with Huawei to improve their service orchestration and automation capabilities over the next few years, with a focus on in-depth decoupling of software and hardware to unleash the agility and scalability potential of their networks. Huawei believes that the telecom industry will successfully evolve to the Native Cloud stage by around 2020, when the force of the network will awaken to drive the next wave of business growth and innovation for carriers.