By Alix Leconte, VP for Service Providers (EMEA) at F5
The use of energy by the telecommunications sector is under scrutiny as never before. Geopolitical tensions and concerns about climate change are only increasing the pressure on operators to become more efficient, across all operations they run and everywhere from network cores to data centers and beyond.
According to Telecoms.com’s 2022 Climate Action Survey, reducing energy consumption was listed as the most pressing operational challenge facing the industry (64% of respondents).
Around the world, thoughts on service consolidation and modern alternative deployment models are gaining prominence across the industry, with business leaders looking for ways to improve efficiency with minimal cost increments and with ever fewer service interruptions.
In fact, according to theglobal investigation conducted by Heavy Reading in the 5G field and aimed at network strategists, the main approach to reduce energy consumption reported by respondents was to move as many functions as possible to a common infrastructure platform (52%). Followed by reducing infrastructure footprint and increasing energy efficiency with edge computing (45%), consolidating functions and vendors for tighter energy management and cost efficiency (40%) .
Commenting on the results, Gabriel Brown, principal analyst at Heavy Reading, observed that “the unbundling and multi-vendor approach introduce some inefficiencies by their nature; reflecting on how to deal with them is definitely important”. According to Brown, consolidating core workloads onto a common cloud platform appears to be “the most logical move operators can make to reduce power consumption in core 5G mobile.” However, the presence of different responses from respondents indicates that operators “will combine multiple approaches in their energy reduction strategy”.
Cloud-Native to the rescue?
According to the report of the Capgemini research institute – Networks on Cloud: A Clear Advantage – nearly half of telecom network capacity will be fully cloud-native in the next three to five years.
The study also indicates that operators will spend $206 million annually on this cloud transformation over the next five years. Organizations that will approach the transition to cloud-native in time, it is possible to obtain the maximum value in terms of economics and environmental sustainability. Regarding the latter, research suggests that those who embrace the telco cloud are expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% over the next three to five years. Cloud telco is also expected to realize sustainability benefits through reduced facility emissions (for example, reduced physical hardware footprint, lower power consumption, on-demand network autoscaling, and power consumption of mobile phone towers using artificial intelligence and machine learning).
That’s why the cloud native network functions (CNF) they will increasingly come into play, or at least they should. CNFs are software implementations of a function or application that traditionally run on a physical device.
Purpose-built to move workloads to cloud-native architectures, this technology can eliminate heavy legacy telco virtualization software layers, as well as automate and orchestrate operations for maximum efficiency. All this without giving up the intrinsic possibility of being able to scale their networks.
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This also means that more functions can be combined on a single platform, increasing performance and using less server capacity, fewer CPU cycles and, therefore, less energy. For example, 5G network managers can migrate existing network functions to cloud-native versions of them.
It is important to note that with CNFs well established, a single command (or API call) can activate multiple network functions, such as DNS, gateway-to-Internet firewall (GiFW), and carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT). . This opens up a whole new scenario of flexibility, including the ability to scale workloads “on the fly” when needed. For example, an operator could use CNFs to quickly provision compute and network capacity for a major sporting event and then shut it down after the tournament is over, as needed. A traditional approach of running functions on dedicated hardware can take several months to set up.
Conversely, a CNF platform consolidated it can be turned on and off quickly as needed, and its energy consumption is kept to a minimum. The principle is the same as when your TV or smartphone switches to energy saving mode if you are not using it.
In F5, we completely decoupled our control and data planes to build true cloud-native functions from scratch. We are now able to scale the data plan and activate and deactivate critical applications/functions (like CGNAT) in seconds, compared to around 15 minutes with competitive CNF solutions. A virtualized “wrapper” is less effective than a true CNF and requires different functions located on different servers.
F5 is also introducing refactored versions of the software security features used for BIG-IP hardware and virtual networking features in a CNF form factor, including Edge Firewall, CGNAT, DNS, and Policy Enforcer. This compatibility allows telcos to seamlessly migrate to a cloud-native architecture when it makes sense, while protecting the initial investment.
Additionally, you can run our CNF suite on CNF-optimized F5 hardware (rather than off-the-shelf commercial hardware), realizing additional flexibility. Offloading selected features to the hardware allows telcos to significantly boost performance, getting the best of both worlds, ie cloud-native features while benefiting from the increased performance power of an F5 hardware device. As always, choice matters: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to sustainability.
The impact of consolidation
Even if energy prices fall in the future, consolidation will still prove and remain beneficial: a simplified solution can not only have better performance and greater reliability, but is also able to do it at lower costs. By reducing complexity, consolidation can enable telecom companies to fully leverage the core benefits of 5G CNFs over running the same functions on dedicated hardware or virtual network functions (VNFs), thereby achieving flexibility, scalability, and portability.
It is encouraging to observe how all this is not just a theoretical discourse: the telcos, in fact, are starting to take concrete steps in terms of consolidation. Rakuten Mobile, for example, has been able to reduce CPU usage by more than 60% by consolidating CNFs into its 5G data plane, while limiting the number of CPU hops and latency. The telcos’ innovative architecture optimizes resource consumption, while the simplified network structure facilitates the deployment of new services and software updates, a testament to what is possible today (and it is expected that many other telcos will follow suit). .
At F5 we also estimate that consolidating network functions into the N6-LAN could reduce capital costs by 60% while decreasing operating costs. In addition, we ran some tests combining F5’s CNFs with higher density 64-core high-performance chips, proving that performance can actually be improved, while the data center consumes less energy and requires less cooling. It’s still early days, but we expect telco consolidation initiatives and F5 innovations aligned to specific use cases to continue to gain traction.