Standardization of the 5th Generation Fixed Network for Enabling End-to-End Network Slicing and Quality-Assured Services

Abstract

Fixed networks play an increasingly important role in supporting broadband services to homes, offices, shopping centers, business buildings, factories, smart cities, and much more. Reaching closer to end-user access points in rooms, office desks, and even factory machinery, optical fiber will realize its full potential to support a fully connected, intelligent world with high bandwidth, high reliability, low latency, and low energy consumption. With the fiber-to-everywhere vision, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) established an industry specification group (ISG) dedicated to the definition and specification of the 5th generation fixed network (F5G) in 2020. In this article, we describe the overall architecture of F5G, which consists of three interacting planes, the management, control and analysis plane, the service plane, and the underlay plane. F5G enables the quality of service (QoS) of each of the various services carried to be satisfied via end-to-end (E2E) network slicing over the customer premises network, access network, aggregation network, and core network segments. With the comprehensive service-oriented features of F5G, 14 use cases have been conceived under three main application scenarios, enhanced fixed broadband, guaranteed reliable experience, and full fiber connection. We show that F5G is capable of supporting these use cases with the requested QoS in terms of bandwidth, latency, agile service creation and bandwidth adjustment, fine granularity of bandwidth reservation, and automated E2E network orchestration and management. To further show the capabilities of the F5G architecture, we discuss the E2E network slicing in a cloud virtual reality demonstration, as well as a time-sensitive optical network for supporting cloud-based industrial applications. Finally, future perspectives of F5G and its standardization are discussed.