Three new standards for 5G adoption were announced last week by the Broadband Forum that covered fixed mobile convergence, the access gateway function, and end-user devices. The association said it marked a major step forward to “unlock a new wave of 5G innovation and prepare telcos for the mass adoption of 5G.”
Used across many platforms such as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), the standards were designed to reduce development time, as well as capex and opex, from the traditional disparate fixed broadband and 5G networks.
“True convergence requires the use of a single converged 5G core network enabling us to provide exciting services to customers, irrespective of whether they cannot connect to it via wireless or wireline technologies,” said Santiago Tenorio, Head of Network Architecture at Vodafone. “This set of new Broadband Forum convergence standards is a significant step towards enabling the vision of seamless and consistent handling of customer connectivity in the era of 5G and Gigabit access.”
The standards are:
The 5G WWC architecture includes the set of functions and interfaces that realizes the use cases targeted by the BBF and 3GPP for the 3GPP Release 16, including network functions for adapting wireline access onto the 5G Core.
It enables several deployment scenarios, to support different network environments, starting points and priorities, with different cases in terms of Residential Gateway (RG) type, access networks and interfacing model with the 5G Core. As part of these scenarios, devices supporting 3GPP procedures, connected to the RG via the WiFi in the LAN and/or over the RAN, may also access the 5G core network.
The Access Gateway Function is a logical function deployed between the physical access media (e.g., DSL, PON, GE) in the wireline access network and the 5G core network. Functional requirements specified for the AGFcover the deployment scenarios described in TR-470 [9]. Both Fixed Network-Residential Gateway (FN-RG) as well as 5G-Residential Gateway (5G-RG) devices are supported.
The Device:2 data model consists of a set of data objects covering things like basic device information, time-of-day configuration, network interface and protocol stack configuration, routing and bridging management, throughput statistics, and diagnostic tests. It also defines a baseline profile that specifies a minimum level of data model support. The cornerstone of the Device:2 data model is the interface stacking mechanism. Network interfaces and protocol layers are modeled as independent data objects that can be stacked, one on top of the other, into whatever configuration a device might support.
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