Samsung Electronics and SK Telecom completed a 5G Standalone (SA) Core test using SDN on a 5G network. The interoperability test between 5G SA Core and 3GPP standards for network slicing and other technologies was a first in South Korea and for the operator and vendor.

The effort, which the companies say is the culmination of five years of joint development, is being described as the “final stage for testing the validity of 5G SA data transmission, signifying that the SA system is ready to be launched for commercial services.”

The companies explained that the 5G SA Core is now ready for commercial services, but did not provide any details about when that will occur. It’s also unclear if Samsung is working on the 5G SA Core with other operators in South Korea or elsewhere.

"In general, we are carrying out development verification test and IoT (including RAN and device) in a testbed to deploy it on a commercial network," the vendor explained in a statement to SDxCentral. "The time and cost required to deploy 5G SA Core equipment depends on the operator's development and construction process."

Early deployments of 5G are running on 5G non-standalone (NSA) architecture, which relies on 4G LTE equipment. When 5G SA is operational, data throughput could improve threefold and performance will rise for new services around autonomous driving, industrial applications, and mixed reality, according to the companies.

Various components of the 5G ecosystem are still being developed and standardized, but the 5G SA Core is a critical piece of a fully virtualized, cloud-based, software-defined, standalone 5G network running on new equipment. The 5G core also introduces many new networking technologies.

During the test, Samsung and SK Telecom used data parallel processing to allow for simultaneous processing and packet classification, quality of service processing, billing, accelerated data transmission, and a technology that automates data traffic for a mobile edge computing platform.

“The fundamental structure of 5G SA is built on a completely new configuration, successfully delivering the most optimized 5G service to customers and enterprises across numerous industries,” Jeon Jae-ho, executive vice president and head of research and development at Samsung’s networks business, said in a prepared statement.

Samsung and SK Telecom say the 5G SA Core supports network slicing and function modulation based on the latest 3GPP standards, but it also supports operator functions that are currently in use on 4G LTE networks including billing and subscriber management.

“Since the initial phase of [non-standalone] rollout, SK Telecom has been focusing on developing SA technology that offers a greater variety of services and differentiated call quality, which will be launched early next year,” SK Telecom CTO Park Jin-hyo said in a prepared statement.

SK Telecom’s collaboration with Samsung on the 5G SA Core is yet another 5G-centric partnership for the South Korean operator. The company, which was among the first mobile operators to launch 5G services alongside its domestic peers KT and LG Uplus, formed a joint venture with Deutsche Telekom to develop 5G infrastructure, and signed agreements with Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung for joint research and development on 5G and, yes, 6G technologies.