Use telecommunication policy to guide network traffic

Picture this: You’re on a crowded New York street, packed with people, Ubers — yes, yellow taxis — jostling in front, cyclists weaving in and out of the way, and pizza delivery men cursing that food must be delivered in 30 minutes or promised free.

Suddenly, an ambulance approached the crowd with a frantic siren. All of a sudden, traffic slows down and the crowd moves spontaneously to the sides, opening up a path. This magical scene only happens because of policy: ambulances have the right of way.

If some transportation systems don’t know the right-of-way rules, they won’t be able to make decisions about when to slow down and turn, which will cause chaos for other cars and pedestrians, prevent ambulances from getting through, and potentially bring traffic to a standstill.

The same goes for telecommunications. A network policy is a set of rules (such as right-of-way) that govern the behavior of network devices. Policies use predefined rules and real-time network data to allocate limited resources, such as bandwidth, which determines how traffic flows through the network. Like traffic lights, telecom network policies are used to limit limited access to network capacity, and we should not undermine them.

5G operators, like 4G operators, offer services to individuals and businesses. However, 5G is complicated because it carries the expectation that it will be extremely fast and reliable with millisecond delays, and it will provide broadband-like mobile services. As operators seize these opportunities to develop new services and iot use cases, and as network slicing becomes widespread, telecom policies will need to evolve according to 5G needs and user expectations.

02 Digital transformation requires a data platform

5G networks have huge capacity, and network slicing provides an end-to-end network segmentation method for specific use cases, such as pedestrians and sidewalks, and the capacity requirements of those use cases.

However, the capacity requirement is only one aspect, we also need to provide quality of service assurance and delay assurance. And these requirements vary from use case to use case and scenario to scenario, which is why modern telecom companies need dynamic policy control, where rules and conditions change over time, or applications need to be adapted and adjusted according to actual scenarios.

The most critical factor in making these policy decisions is the extremely low delay. As a result, we are faced with the difficulty that these systems require complex decisions to be made with very low latency. Decisions need to take into account all of these aspects:

  • Data: account balance data, rating data, SLA data, network data;
  • Business logic: QoS based on rating, QoS management based on network data, policy based on slice, etc.
  • Machine learning on network data.

Typically, 4G and older systems treat each element as a separate technology. Data used to be accessed from the data storage unit and then processed in the policy control function module. This is a very expensive process based on the following perspectives:

  • Long delay: It takes more time to transmit data over the network.
  • Networking: Moving data over the network rather than processing it in real time, where databases artificially limit the number of policy calls for a given infrastructure;
  • Infrastructure: Thus, to ensure scalability while maintaining low latency, it may mean adding more infrastructure, which may be great for software and hardware vendors but not so easy for telecom carriers.

Digital networks such as 5G require a smooth relationship between the network function layer and the data layer. Modern policy systems rely on a data platform that shares business logic with network functionality while allowing business rules to be modified en route. By tightly integrating data and data-driven decisions, operators can achieve predictable scalability while maintaining extremely low latency. Only modern telecom data platforms can support real-time data processing and decision making within the 10ms window required by 5G latency and modern telecom policies.

Modern data platform — born for modern telecommunication service

Digital transformation heralds a new era of real-time, event – and data-driven intelligence that needs to process complex decisions to optimize automated operations with the speed, scale, and precision required by 5G.

Operators need a hypercombustible data platform that can handle the entire data life cycle quickly and seamlessly. This enables real-time decision making to prioritize high-performance applications while managing network traffic effectively and efficiently. This platform can strip away redundant stack layers and support advanced ARTIFICIAL intelligence tools and distributed computing, which will be our main business direction.

VoltDB could help telecom companies and communication service providers use real-time data to run their digital and 5G businesses. Manage networks and applications with real-time analysis and real-time control of streaming data, gain more opportunities to interact with new customers, and increase revenue through 5G monetization. We have verified and tested in the telecom space of BSS, and our database has the best architecture of BSS in the 5G era.

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About VoltDB VoltDB supports strong ACID and real-time intelligent decision making apps to enable connected worlds. No other database product like VoltDB can fuel an app that demands a combination of low latency, massive scale, high concurrency and accuracy at the same time. Founded by 2014 Turing Prize winner Dr Mike Stonebraker, VoltDB has redesigned relational databases to address today’s growing real-time manipulation and machine learning challenges. Dr. Stonebraker has been researching database technology for more than 40 years and has brought many innovations in fast data, streaming data and in-memory databases. During VoltDB’s development, he realized the full potential of using in-memory transaction database technology to mine streaming data, not only to meet the latency and concurrency requirements of processing data, but also to provide real-time analysis and decision-making. VoltDB is a trusted name in the industry and has worked with leading organisations such as Nokia, Financial Times, Mitsubishi Electric, HPE, Barclays and Huawei.