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Preface

The transition to 5G is happening, and unless you’ve been actively trying to ignore it, you’ve undoubtedly heard the hype. But if you are like 99% of the CS-trained, systems-oriented, cloud-savvy people in the world, the cellular network is largely a mystery. You know it’s an important technology used in the last mile to connect people to the Internet, but you’ve otherwise abstracted it out of your scope-of-concerns.

The important thing to understand about 5G is that it implies much more than a generational upgrade in bandwidth. It involves transformative changes that blur the line between the access network and the cloud. And it will encompass enough value that it has the potential to turn the “Access-as-frontend-to-Internet” perspective on its head. We are just as likely to be talking about “Internet-as-backend-to-Access” ten years from now.

This book is written for someone that has a working understanding of the Internet and cloud, but has had limited success penetrating the myriad of acronyms that dominate cellular networking. In fairness, the Internet has its share of acronyms, but it also comes with a sufficient set of abstractions to help manage the complexity. It’s hard to say the same for the cellular network, where pulling on one thread seemingly unravels the entire space. It has also been the case that the cellular network had been largely hidden inside proprietary devices, which has made it impossible to figure it out for yourself.

This book is the result of a mobile networking expert teaching a systems person about 5G as we’ve collaborated on an open source 5G implementation. The material has been used to train other software developers, and we are hopeful it will be useful to anyone that wants a deeper understanding of 5G and the opportunity for innovation it provides. Readers that want hands-on experience can also access the open source software introduced in the book.

This book will likely be a work-in-progress for the foreseeable future. It’s not intended to be encyclopedic—favoring perspective and end-to-end completeness over every last bit of detail—but we do plan to flesh out the content over time. Your suggestions (and contributions) to this end are welcome.

Larry Peterson and Oğuz Sunay

Open Networking Foundation

June 2020