The 5G Deterministic Networking Summit was successfully held at MWC19, Shanghai. Ms. Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Core Network Product Line, delivered an opening speech on the summit. She explained the concept of 5G deterministic networking to guests and called on industry partners to jointly promote the rapid and healthy development of 5G in the industry based on the 5G deterministic networking industry alliance and innovation base.

5G emerges as a blessing for users in terms of better, faster, and richer experience. More vertical industries are paying attention to 5G technology — in cases such as drone cruising, drone logistics, remote surgery, automatic ambulance rescue, autonomous driving, assisted driving, and industrial control. The 5G network's high bandwidth and low latency provide opportunities for digital transformation of vertical industries. 5G is regarded as the optimal choice for industry digitization, especially because of the mobile network characteristics, such as easy deployment and ubiquitous access at any time. Although wireless networks have brought capability for the digital transformation of industries in the 3G and 4G eras, it is obvious that 5G will bring more remarkable opportunities to vertical industries.

The design concept of 5G is quite different from that of 4G. 4G offers a best-effort wireless network. However, 5G needs to provide a deterministic and differentiated experience for vertical industries implementing varying levels of differentiation for services. This will allow wireless networks to not only provide services universally to the public, but also virtual private networks to vertical industries to drive their digital transformation, with the capabilities of flexible function orchestration and scheduling. “5G deterministic networking” is the concept that we’re going to share with you today.

The 5G deterministic networking is an end-to-end concept, covering the base station, transmission, and core network. Among these, the brain of deterministic capability is the 5G core network. The core network is responsible for global resource scheduling and management during network quality assurance. The core network manages all network topology, access information, user data, and industry requirements. It ensures that the users in each industry can enjoy their own private channels on the public network with guaranteed deterministic experience.

The 5G deterministic networking is based on the Cloud Native, distributed architecture, and has two key enabling technologies: hyper-performance heterogeneous MEC and dynamic, intelligent network slicing. Hyper-performance heterogeneous MEC minimizes network latency. Dynamic intelligent network slicing enables each industry to have its own virtual network. These ensure data security, network security, and network quality.

Edge computing is vital for 5G deterministic networking. The hyper-performance heterogeneous MEC node has two core tasks: The first is to reduce end-to-end network latency to an acceptable range. Latency is the most important factor of all network capabilities, as it is used by a deterministic networking to adapt to requirements of different industry applications. Hyper-performance heterogeneous MEC is the core technology for implementing 5GaaS (5G as a Service). It reduces latency and enables connections to be quickly implemented at the edge for thousands of industries. Of course, low latency is not enough. The second key point is the open ecosystem. The benefits of deterministic networking, especially application-specific, end-to-end deterministic latency, cannot be ensured if the application is not carried on an edge node. Therefore, the MEC platform (MEP) is important to enable interconnection and collaboration between various industries on the network edge. With MEP, applications can be quickly deployed on edge nodes, ensuring deterministic latency and reliability.

Unlike common user requirements, industry requirements can vary greatly. Take remote metering as an example. Remote metering involves a large number of connections. It is not bandwidth-hungry or latency-sensitive, but it requires higher security and reliability. The requirements for applications such as remote surgery and autonomous driving are even more stringent: deterministic latency, high security, and "six nines" (99.9999%) or even more ultra-reliability with an annual downtime of just a few seconds. To address such requirements, dynamic, intelligent slicing technology is introduced. It builds multiple software-based, virtual private networks through flexible software orchestration and scheduling on a public network, public resource pool, and public physical hardware platform. It also delivers different network capabilities on these private networks, including but not limited to bandwidth, latency, packet loss, jitter, and even security management mechanisms. In the future, dynamic intelligent slicing capabilities will need to be exposed for vertical industries to customize and subscribe to. They must not only accommodate new applications requiring a differentiated, deterministic experience, but also promise easy accessibility and agility. This way, the 5G network will be a true enabler for digital transformation of industry verticals.

Developing an ecosystem is crucial to 5G deterministic networking building. Deterministic networking, particularly from the edge computing prospective, requires a lot of support from operators, vendors, and all industry partners. A big, healthy, and productive ecosystem paves the way for quick, flexible utilization of 5G network capabilities on edge nodes and quick generation of virtual private networks for services on the edge, such as media, industrial control, remote surgery, drones, and more. 5G deterministic networking has a promising future, and as a result, so does its ecosystem. The ecosystem is full of hopes and dreams. We need to work together to make it happen.

As the saying goes: "If you want to go fast, walk alone; and if you want to go far, walk together." A comprehensive ecosystem will make our journey of deterministic networking easier. Deterministic networking will unleash the full potential of 5G networks. It will not only enable individual users to access faster and better services, but also accelerate digital transformation of vertical industries. We look forward to teaming up and making 5G the key driving force for industry digitization.