Bringing new 5G services inside the home with 5G-Residental Gateways

Bringing new 5G services inside the home with 5G-Residental Gateways

By David Allan, WWC Work Area Director and David Woolley, Outstanding Contributor for the BUS Work Area at the Broadband Forum

The Broadband Forum webinar brought together the leading lights in the service provider and vendor community and those individuals that play a crucial role in contributing to the standards work across the globe. The insightful webinar delved into key Use Cases and aspects unique to Wireless Wireline Convergence (WWC) and enabling new services for devices in the home.

Key enablers of 5G-RG

A key enabler of the 5G Residential Gateway (5G-RG) is multi-session, having the capacity to multiplex multiple sessions each as a unique connection between the 5G-RG and Access Gateway Function (AGF) on top of the customer VLAN. This enables each session to be unique in terms of User Plane Functions (UPFs) selection, unique addressing per session, different Quality of Service (QoS) and policies, as well as different owners in terms of charging and billing. Service providers are therefore able to manage a voice session on a dedicated UPF that is virtualized and has private IP addressing. While the Internet traffic may be handled by the combined co-located UPF with the AGF. Video traffic, business traffic or community Wi-Fi can all be on their own unique session with different policies for each.

The second key enabler is multi-access with the functionality of ATSSS (Access Traffic Steering, Switching, Splitting). This is based on the Residential Gateway with dual access, PON, DSL on the wireline side and 5G and LTE on the wireless side. The LTE support is critical for the BBF operator community as it ensures that you don’t need to wait to have 5G radio available everywhere to deploy it, it can be implemented with the existing radio and the operator can create and manage logical sessions that leverage both uplinks. This provides enhanced reliability, leverages existing network coverage and if one link goes down, there is seamless availability for connectivity, bandwidth aggregation and policy-based forwarding. Other key enablers include providing the opportunity for third party applications to interact with the 5G network and dynamic exposure of 5G connectivity within the 5G-RG enabling separation of communities of interest via traffic mapping.

Achieving multi-access connectivity

The 5G Core network is a great enabler in terms of capabilities to run sessions or multiple sessions, and at Broadband Forum are developing the specifications to support hybrid access for RGs connected to the 5G System. Those specifications and technology allow us to maximize throughput, redundancy and reliability. This provides the ability to not just run isolated sessions on each access, but to run multiple sessions that use multiple access either as active standby or simultaneously. Devices connected to the 5G-RG can benefit from integrated seamless service delivery and device management, rather than looking after isolated or separate networks themselves. Operators are therefore able to leverage innovation and common procedures specified by 3GPP and Broadband Forum which results in a better experience for customers across available access network assets. This will also ensure a smooth evolution path to a standardized 5G Hybrid allowing the migration from existing solutions and bring the benefits of the 5G Core and toolkit.

In terms of extending the 5G toolkit to the Residential Gateway and assets and services that are deployed, multiple accesses can benefit from a consistent feature set and feature operation and the QoS management capabilities per session are advanced and can be leveraged across different accesses. This brings a benefit for the customer that is interested in consuming the application with the appropriate QoS, no matter the access network. The traffic can also be steered and the access network selected, therefore it still maintains a common identity. The 5G toolkit and the enablement of multi-access capabilities beyond the existing Use Cases, opens up improvements in areas such as gaming, reliable home office and lower hybrid Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This 5G toolkit enables standard products leveraging open-source software, in compliance with the specifications of Broadband Forum and 3GPP bringing the best breed of solutions leveraging multi-access.

Separating traffic into separate flows

There are a number of Use Cases with the ability to separate traffic into separate sessions or flows and have a unique business relationship per session or flow that is of interest to the 5G operators. This can be achieved in a number of ways depending on the requirements of the parties involved. The key is that the 5G system can dynamically establish this “separation of interests” scenarios to accommodate the needs of the various actors connected to the 5G system. Some example Use Cases that leverage this are distance learning where enhanced QoS may be required to support collaboration tools, parental controls where the children’s access is logically separated in the home and directed to cloud-based monitoring and access control systems, and public Wi-Fi where the subscribers also provide a public hotspot that needs to be isolated from the home network.

As a consequence of the global pandemic, an increased trend has been working from home, and this has driven innovation in the tooling to support it and has seen the deployment of corporate assets to facilitate this. The ability to enhance the work from home environment, is moving to the forefront. This includes aspects of a better quality of experience, resilient connectivity and increased alignment with the best practices for services, enterprise and IT. The workstation of the home requires differentiated handling from a number of dimensions separate from the other Internet appliances in the home, and this brings forward new business requirements and opportunities for the enterprise and the 5G operator.

Download the full recording and slides here: https://www.broadband-forum.org/meetings-and-events/bringing-new-5g-services-inside-the-home-with-5g-residential-gateways-webinar.