Huawei’s fully containerised 5G core network, launched at the first 5G Core Summit in Madrid, applies container technology to all network functions (NFs), with the aim of making network deployment more agile and service roll-out faster.

A statement from Huawei explained, “To cater for differentiated requirements of industry applications in the 5G era, networks must support fast software iteration and upgrade to accelerate service innovation, reduce trial and error costs, and achieve business agility.

“3GPP introduces service-based architecture (SBA) to the 5G core network to flexibly customise and combine NFs on demand.”

Microservices

Huawei has further split NFs into microservices for increased agility, saying that container technology is the best choice for a microservice architecture because it maximises resource utilisation and enables quick location of faults and self-healing.

Huawei said it has adopted cloud-native in NFV-based core networks to realise ‘stateless design’, cross-data-centre deployment and A/B testing.

The 5G Core Summit is hosted by InformaTech and co-hosted by Huawei.