Optimized, automated and protective: An operator’s view on future networks

The current pandemic crisis has highlighted the utmost importance of communication networks. The dramatic development of teleworking imposed by strict confinement measures, the need to access educational materials from home, the likely degradation of social relationships are among the impacts of the pandemic that inevitably affect the operation and the performance of networks. The design and the operation of tomorrow’s networks will have to learn from the outbreak that exacerbates the critical need for massive digital inclusion, robust and resilient infrastructures, as well as dynamically adaptive networking to better cope with various, possibly degraded, network access conditions. Of course, the virus is not the only reason to rethink network design: current 5G deployments are among the networking technologies that encourage the emergence of new services, such as immersive services based upon Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality techniques that are pretty demanding in terms of QoS. This industry vision paper provides a network operator’s perspective on some of the forthcoming networking challenges. It explores a few technical options that are likely to be instrumental in the conception and the delivery of optimized, automated and protective networks, for the benefits of the end-user, regardless of his/her connectivity capabilities, whether he/she is in motion or not, and regardless of the nature of the service or contents he/she needs to access.