PETER DYKES TRANSPORT NETWORKS
THE VIEWFROMNOKIA Traditionally, the transport layer has been using a combination of IP and optical technologies for a number of years and Nokia has been very successful in both fields over the past five years or more. However, there are transformational changes taking place in both the mobile networking layer across the radio access network (RAN) and the mobile core. Driven by the evolution of the 3GPP technologies, from 3G to 4G, and 4G to 5G, in each of those generations, the radio access and core architectures evolve. The question is, what does that do to the transport infrastructure underneath, because at some point, the IP and the optical, have to be connected right down to the fibre layer. EVOLVING THE TRANSPORT LAYER
N okia’s marketing director Nick Cadwgan told Optical Connections, “What we are seeing is that as the mobile network transforms, the transport network must evolve underneath it. Basically, a 3G mobile network has a specific set of requirements in terms of the transport layer, but when we go to 4G, we’re still using the transport network and expecting it to support 4G. Now we’re going to 5G, and 3GPP, which owns the evolution of the mobile network layer, is saying ‘We’ve learned a lot of things from 3G, we got more learnings from 4G, and we’re going to incorporate them in 5G by evolving the architecture again, and this all has to be supported by the transport network.’”
the critical nature of our networks and the way we talk to one another and use networks from a personal, family or business perspective, or indeed from a B2B perspective.” Essentially, this means the mission descriptor depends upon how the end user perceives a particular interaction. It’s potentially different from each of these perspectives and places different requirements on the network infrastructure, which in turn is driving different requirements on the transport network. SYNCHRONISATION A crucial requirement is synchronisation timing, because radio access networks can require very tight synchronisation. Synchronisation falls within multiple tasks including frequency, phase time and synchronisation, which are used
networks which are going to start to be broken up, because they will need to be deployed in different places. He said, “As we have evolved through these G’s, not only are we supporting consumer mobile devices, we’re now talking about Internet of Things and industrial 4.0, and all these are now placing evolving requirements on the transport network. In addition, what the pandemic has done is to reinforce
Cadwgan added that there are network functions in the radio access and core
Nick Cadwgan, marketing director, Nokia
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| ISSUE 25 | Q3 2021
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