Spotlight on...
In our Spotlight on, series we shine a light on some of the innovative features that make 5G stand out from previous systems and explore the potential that these features bring.
Several of these open doorways into many commercial opportunities, not only for deploying new and innovative software, hardware and applications, but also for the provision of middleware solutions, service platform and charging platform development, localised private network deployment and much more.
Consequently, the need for conventional service-providers to open up their networks and partner with third-parties in order to leverage the power and flexibility of their systems has never been greater.
Spotlight on Network and Event Exposure
Prior to 5G, the internal signalling messages and parameters that were used to manage subscribers and devices, and to respond to network events were kept securely within the operator’s domain for use by their operational support systems.
I.e., the message exchanges and parameter-sets used to keep subscribers connected, manage terminal mobility, determine device capabilities and essentially to make the network “work”, were not available to outside entities, nor were they in a single standard format.
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The introduction of the 5G Network Exposure Function (NEF) represented a paradigm shift in the way that this information can be used by third parties and external applications.
The intricacies of subscriber activities, mobility profiles, device connectivity/reachability events and many other parameters can now be made available to entities outside of the mobile network in a consistent format using simple and standardised protocols.
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Event notifications can be subscribed to by external entities and, following suitable security, authorisation and validation, the event types, triggering criteria, parameter details and frequency of notification can be configured for an ever increasing number of activities that take place within the mobile network.
This creates huge potential for network operators to collaborate with third-parties to offer new and innovative solutions, group-oriented services, location-aware charging mechanisms, IoT platforms, and to provide applications and services that are more responsive to mobility and connectivity profiles.
In our Network and Event Exposure training modules we provide full details of the 3GPP Network Exposure Function (NEF) and present the architectures, protocols and procedures that can be used to invoke this functionality on both sides of the NEF boundary.
We then put this in the context of several solution environments including IoT, Video Orchestration and Edge computing examples.
Other topics in our Spotlight on series include:
- 5G Private Networking (Integrated)
- 5G Private Networking (Stand-alone)
- Multi-Access EDGE Computing (MEC)
- Network Slicing
- Virtualisation
- Control and User Plane Separation
- Sidelink connectivity
- Proximity Services
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Please contact us for more details on our Spotlight on training modules.