You deployed a private advanced network (LTE/5G/Wifi-6 or something similar) because you were told these networks offer higher data rates, increased connection density, low latency, and programmability. It sounded like a silver bullet to supercharge your efficiency, growth and more. But after deploying the private advanced network, an automatic guided vehicle (AGV) or autonomous mobile robot (AMR) still got stuck. It encountered an unrecognizable object and could not get a response from the edge or cloud server. Awkward, isn’t it? It can even feel like a failure.

But all it is a missing link between the private network and its use cases. You can avoid such awkward situations if your applications could call network functions through software and request preferential “network slices on the fly.”

That application is the missing link. We call them network-aware applications

The untapped potential in 5G networks is the programmability in the 5G Core (5GC). This capability opens the floodgates for network-aware applications. Developers of network-aware applications can dynamically request higher QoS, secure channel, deterministic routing, low latency, and more.

A true network-aware application:

• Interacts with the network in real-time and checks for network resources availability for mission critical tasks.
• Delivers consistent user experience irrespective of the underlying network infrastructure (Radio or Core)

Shabodi’s Application Enablement Platform (AEP) brings harmony between applications and the network. The AEP makes it easy for third-party application developers to take full advantage of the programmability of advanced networks by exposing simple RESTful APIs (e.g. SetBandWidth, SetPath, among others)

Further, Shabodi automatically discovers the underlying Radio and Core network programmable interfaces and exposes them via simple RESTful APIs to developers. Ultimately, developers building applications on the AEP do not need to know about the underlying Radio network or the Core network APIs. AEP fills that knowledge gap, offering faster way to create innovative applications and services, empowering the advanced network developer community to do what they do best – building to solve complex business problems.

The following set of images demonstrate the use cases of network-aware applications. All that is left to do for developers is to invoke Shabodi APIs to request network resources.

5G use cases and Shabodi API service capabilities

 If you have deployed private 5G and are still using the network as a pipe rather than an intelligent asset, talk to Shabodi.