5G and SDN Laying the Software-Defined Foundations for 5G Networks

5G and the applications it enables, including IoT, requires a significant upgrade and overhaul of carrier infrastructure beyond the radio networks (RAN). To support the diversity of applications, explosion in number and types of devices, capacity and scale of traffic, CSPs (communications service providers) are turning to adoption of data center innovation adapted and re-developed for telco networks. Virtualization, software-defined controls, distributed computing technologies in the form of NFV, SDN and MEC play key roles in the new telco infrastructure. One of the key technologies is SDN, which is important to creating flexibility in the network to support 5G constructs such as network slicing. SDN’s centralized management and distributed controls over complex software-defined networks across the mobile infrastructure is also a key element in 5G scalability.