Test and Measurement
important. Similarly, security is now a key requirement in the technology standards - which telecom operators have traditionally approached from a best-effort model to a more stringent form of various compliance regimes which govern it.
Moving towards 5G
Its greatest proponents agree that 5G will be a truly transformative technology. It will do that by powering new use cases ranging from autonomous vehicles to smart cities. The sheer diversity of those use cases represents innumerable variables to be accounted for. Furthermore, the sheer amount of new services that 5G will be handling represents a huge scaling factor of the things that need to be tested. They’ll also need to be tested across new requirements such as latency and Quality of Service (QoS).
Developments in 5G, like slicing, will pave the way for future innovations and involve a fundamentally different architecture to virtualise and push previously critical functions right to the edge of the network. In itself, this supercharges the requirements for change within the network when compared to previous generations. That innovation will also require an iterative approach to handle
these new complexities, thus dragging testing further away from the previous age of one- and-done lab testing.
Those promises will also produce more rigorous Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and QoS expectations in which stakeholders demand stringent levels of commitment out of their 5G operators. Traditionally when telco operators have degradations in their services, they will have to deal with unhappy customers. Although this is a big issue with signifi cant impacts on CSPs revenues, such degradations in 5G slices (that are used for some critical communications) will not only result in unhappy customers, but it might mean for example, the autonomous vehicles connectivity is degraded, or the traffi c signals connectivity is lost. Now this is far more disastrous compared to unhappy YouTube users. Potent examples exist in a number of sectors - such as healthcare, defence and critical national infrastructure - who will rely on ironclad guarantees that their 5G connectivity is constant and reliable.
Continuous change requires continuous active assurance The modern telecommunications network is constantly evolving and it has given
rise to the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) model to adapt to the constant demands that are now required within the network. This high frequency change requires the introduction of continuous testing. Continuous Testing (CT) automates testing and assurance functions across the lab to live lifecycle to accommodate this new landscape. There are three fundamental components to this model. The first is network emulation - in which testing can create virtualised copies of the environment, digital assets and issues that a network service or product might undergo when deployed. The second is traffic generation. CT has to be able to recreate the sheer amount of traffic that the network will be dealing with in deployment. Finally, there’s automation. CT solutions have to be automated across the lab-to- live lifecycle with a common approach that unifies and consolidates the labs of the providers and vendors into one. Moreover, Active Assurance’s approach is that the testing solutions are constantly injecting synthetic traffic in the Live Network (without impacting or interfering with live traffic). As the 5G Networks are dynamic, the Active Assurance becomes
vital to proactively identify issues before they compound and hit the critical services drastically.
Testing is crucial to an operative, secure telecommunications network that can scale, improve and release at the speed of business - competitive market pressures demand it. At the same time, this puts pressure on the required skills that organisations are eagerly competing for. Building a CT and Active Assurance infrastructure in-house is far more than a technology enhancement. It is a mindset shift in how testing and assurance are approached. As with all transformations, this mindset shift will require what I call catalysts of change that stimulates this mindset change. Also, it may not be the easiest or cost-effective route forward and the urgency with which operators need to implement automated testing and active assurance. Operators may want to reach out to trusted partners to offer managed solutions and services to help implement the automated testing and assurance they so need to keep up with the evolving telecommunications network.
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