Aided by developments like Wi-Fi 6, the dominance of unlicensed wireless local area networking technologies, in many enterprise settings, is destined to continue. Not only is there an entirely new market segment evolving to meet prevailing socioeconomic demands, however, existing businesses are rapidly reinventing themselves to keep up with competition and trends. Borrowing from 4G, these latest Wi-Fi networks can meet signal propagation, speed and QoS requirements when supporting a moderate number of endpoints and classic applications, but with the advent of the fourth industrial revolution - Industry 4.0 - these technologies will be far too limited.
Cutting-edge manufacturing sites, distribution centers and numerous other campus environments can benefit from the deployment of a private 5G infrastructure supporting either 4G or 5G radio access networks. From algorithmic updates to a production processes, predictive maintenance of machinery and real-time interaction with autonomous distribution vehicles, private 5G networks afford numerous advantages for modern enterprises.
Demanding 100% cloud native network functions (CNFs), well-architected 5G Core components are ideally suited to deployment within distributed enterprise data centers. CNFs are built using microservices methodologies, ensuring resiliency and granular scalability and adaptability. CNFs are deployable in public, private or across hybrid multi-access edge compute (MEC) and core cloud architectures, enabling easy adoption by any Managed Service Provider (MSP).
Private 5G infrastructure supporting industry 4.0
5G was designed specifically to support the types of massive senor grids and industrial IoT (IIOT) applications we are currently witnessing the emergence of. A 5G radio access network (RAN) not only survives in harsh industrial environments, it thrives in them. The varying arrival times (spatial diversity), as the signal is bounced from different obstacles, forms multiple time-division duplexing (TDD) channels that can deliver path redundancy for duplicate signals or increase the channel capacity by transmitting different parts of the modulated data. Moreover, the native mobility built into carrier scale networks enable nomadic endpoints to move continuously around a campus without stopping to re-establish new connections when traversing access points.
Private 5G can deliver ultra low latency and incredibly high bandwidth connections supporting artificial intelligence-driven applications serving an exploding number of sensors and endpoints. With distributed cloud architectures, local processing allows machine learning algorithms to be applied on massive amounts of data without leaving the security and privacy of the enterprise campus. Remaining in the private domain, less demanding real-time and non-real-time traffic can be offloaded to edge or core computing power, hosted by managed service providers.
The 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA) affords the ability to establish distinct network slices, comprising completely independent control and user plane functions. This allows mobile network operators to partition their public network, creating a practically unlimited number of private LTE or 5G instances supporting their enterprise customers or those of their MSP partners. With user plane functions resident on the premise location, traffic can be dynamically steered to either the customers private network, towards a software defined virtual private network delivered across the operators shared infrastructure or the Internet.
With these valuable features, inherent flexibility, ease of operation and low cost of entry private LTE and private 5G networks, deployed using cloud native 5G core infrastructure, will power the industries of the future. Click here to learn how Metaswitch can help deliver a private LTE or private 5G solution.