Erik Ekudden, Group CTO, Ericsson
All around the world, the unprecedented events of 2020 have brought into focus the critical role of digital infrastructure in the functioning of virtually every aspect of contemporary society. More than ever before, communication technologies are providing innovative solutions to help address the social, environmental and economic challenges by enhancing efficiency, and enabling intensified network usage and well-informed decisions.
Future technologies will enable a fully digitalised, automated and programmable world of connected humans, machines, things and places. Over time, the percentage of traffic generated by humans will drop while the traffic generated by machines and computer vision systems such as autonomous vehicles, drones and surveillance systems will rise. Future network capabilities will also include support for the transfer of sensing modalities such as sensations and smell.
Going forward, the network platform will act as a seamless universal connectivity fabric characterised by almost limitless scalability and affordability. Its capabilities extend beyond communication services to include embedded compute and storage, and distributed intelligence, which provide users with insights and reasoning.
Drivers of network platform evolution
The following are the three key drivers that are most significant for the evolution of the network platform and for bridging the gap between physical reality and the digital realm.
A collaborative, automated physical world
Soon, there will be hundreds of billions of connected physical objects with embedded sensing, actuation and computing capabilities, that continuously generate informative data. The sensor data generated by physical objects can be used to create their digital twins. The digitalisation of the physical environment, in which the physical objects interact, requires sensor data fusion, that is, using data from multiple sources to create an accurate digital representation of the physical environment.
Ultimately, the joint communication and sensing in future systems will make it possible to leverage all interconnected digital twins and digital representations of the environment to create a complete digital representation of everything.
Connected, intelligent machines
Machines will become increasingly intelligent and autonomous as their cognitive abilities continue to expand. The network platform will provide an automated environment in which interconnected, intelligent machines can communicate, and support AI-to-AI communication and autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles and intelligent machines in factories.
Cognition is one of the most important features of an intelligent machine. Cognitive machines are capable of self-learning from their interactions and experiences with their environment. They generate hypotheses and reasoned arguments, make recommendations, and take actions. They can handle complexity and unpredictability. The future network will empower cognitive machines by providing them with new network features and services such as sensing, high-precision positioning and distributed computing capabilities.
The internet of senses
In the years ahead, major leaps forward are expected in sensor and actuator technologies, such as the actuation of smell and high quality touch sensation. Holographic communication will be possible without wearing extended reality glasses with the help of 3D light field display technologies. Other examples are contact lenses that can display augmented reality content, universal translator ear-buds that allow language-independent communication and exoskeletons that increase physical strength.
The network platform supports the internet of senses with novel network enablers such as distributed compute, high-precision positioning, integrated sensing and application programming interfaces. These are needed to support bandwidth and latency reservation, network latency reporting and network slice prioritisation.
Critical enablers of future network platform
The network platform is designed to deliver the kind of extreme performance required by applications such as internet of senses and communication among intelligent machines. It will also serve new types of devices with close-to-zero cost and close-to-zero energy implementations, which can be embedded into everything.
Omnipresent and non-limiting connectivity
The concept of ubiquitous radio access is evolving to achieve a future network that will deliver non-limiting performance to satisfy the needs of humans, things and machines by enhancing multidimensional coverage, providing stellar capacity and augmenting capabilities.
Connected airborne devices such as drones require access on altitudes up to several kilometres, making it necessary to have a 3D point of view, including the elevation aspect, to provide coverage. There is also a need to ensure high performing indoor connectivity by increasing the number of indoor small cells and fully integrating them.
Further, network topologies and deployments will need to become increasingly flexible to provide coverage everywhere and deliver extreme performances. The rapidly growing demand for connected sensors and actuators has also made it necessary to invent zero-energy devices. These will be deployed once and will operate without maintenance or external charging.
The network will utilise high frequency bands to deliver extreme performances. For example, the terahertz frequency band (above 100 GHz) has some attractive properties, including terabit-per-second link capacities and miniature transceivers. Full duplex is another component that can, in some specific scenarios, substantially increase the link capacity as compared to half duplex.
Pervasive network compute fabric
As distributed compute and storage capabilities continue to evolve, the lines between the device, the edge of the network and the cloud are becoming increasingly blurred. In the network compute fabric, connectivity, compute and storage will be integrated. They will interact to provide maximum performance, reliability, low jitters and millisecond latencies to the applications they support. The network also provides a continuous execution environment for access and core functions. It runs on a distributed cloud infrastructure with integrated acceleration for data-intensive virtual network functions and applications.
The upcoming novel computing architectures include memory-centric computing, optical computing, nanocomputing, neuromorphic computing and even quantum computing. In the future, these architectures will enable continued exponential growth in compute capacity for most applications running on the network compute fabric – an important development as the end of Moore’s law approaches.
Trustworthy infrastructure
The always-on characteristics of the network platform such as reliability, availability and resilience cover the complete network. The always-on mechanisms are built into the user plane, the control plane and device mobility solutions. All parts of the network will be addressed including transport nodes and transport networks, network infrastructure and site solutions. Network platform solutions leverage confidential computing to protect identities and data, and establish trust among network customers and their assets, thereby offering assurance to users and regulators.
Cognitive network
In line with the vision of zero-touch network management and operations, networks are deployed and operated with minimum human intervention using trustworthy AI technologies. All operational processes and tasks, including delivery, deployment, configuration, assurance and optimisation, will be executed with 100 per cent automation. The network itself will continuously learn from its environment observations, interactions with humans and previous experiences. The cognitive processes understand the network situation, plan for wanted outcomes, decide the action plan and act accordingly. The cognitive network will be able to optimise its existing knowledge, build on experience and reason in order to solve new problems.
The network will utilise intent-based and distributed intelligence for multiple functions, including optimisation of the radio interface, automation of network management and orchestration such as the optimisation of parameters, handling of alarms and self-healing. AI algorithms will be deployed and trained at different network domains such as the core network and the radio network. Physical layer algorithms such as link adaptation, handover, power control and dynamic scheduling of resources can be optimised with AI agents.
Conclusion
Designed to carry vital messages, commands, reasoning, insights, intelligence and all the sensory information needed to support the continuous evolution of industry and society, the network platform is the spinal cord of digital infrastructure. It is also the ideal platform for all types of innovation, which has the ability to support interactions that empower an intelligent, sustainable and connected world. The major advantage of the network platform is that it will be accessible anywhere and will be always on with guaranteed performance. Nomadic distributed processing and storage will be embedded into it to support advanced applications.
It will be inherently reliable and resilient, meeting all the requirements of secure communication. Cognitive operations, and maintenance of the network and its services will deliver the most cost-efficient and sustainable solution to meet any and all communication needs. With this in mind, it is clear that the most important future network trends to watch for are those that are closely related to the growth and expansion of intelligent digital infrastructure on the network platform.
