# Converging Telco-Grade Solutions 5G and beyond to Support Production in Industry 4.0
## 5 The Telco Cloud Enabled 5G Applications
### State-of-the-Art Overview  
The paper [183] provides an overview of the transition to Telco Cloud and clarifies the key dimensioning, accessibility plan ideas, and some operability challenges. The transition of telecommunication networks from proprietary hardware-based infrastructure to Telco Cloud introduces new features in terms of service availability, system dimensioning, and operation. These advancements allow for the efficient handling of ever-increasing traffic and the expansion of services. 5G is expected to fully leverage technologies such as network automation, software-defined networking, network function virtualization, and network slicing. These will present new opportunities as well as new challenges for dimensioning and operating 5G networks. The authors also looked at some examples from R&D as well as feedback from real operator networks. According to [197], fog computing enables a new breed of applications and services that go beyond traditional telecom services, implying a fruitful interplay between the cloud and the fog. As a result, a distributed intelligent platform at the edge that manages distributed computing, networking, and storage resources are required. As a result, the author proposed the TelcoFog as a novel, secure, highly distributed, and ultra-dense fog computing infrastructure that can be allocated at the edge of the Telecom Network to provide multiple unified, cost-effective, and new 5G services such as NFV, MEC, and third-party services (e.g., smart cities, and IoT). They also present a new architecture for providing unified cloud and fog resources for unifying NFV, MEC, and IoT services on top of a telecom operator's network, assisting telecom operators in lowering their total cost of ownership. The TelcoFog architecture is depicted in Figure 12.  
Figure 11: Telco Cloud benefits. The authors of [176] discuss the emergence of Telco Cloud Technology, where, by implementing cloud computing platforms, telcos can reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs. Given that the major issue in the telecom industry is the increased cost of CAPEX and OPEX due to the significant growth in users and network traffic, their position is that the deployment of the Telco Cloud platform is required to ensure long-term profitability. The cloud computing model significantly improves average telecom equipment utilization by virtualizing traditional equipment and services as interface between users and applications. They state that the reduction in OPEX is mainly achieved by integrating automation and orchestration into the service management process, thus, reducing manual activities. They also saw the Telco Cloud as enabling a virtual telecom operator concept via an open platform. The rapidly growing measure of cloud-based Virtual Network Functions introduced new concepts for dimensioning, sending activity to the executives, authorizing, and monitoring. One of the earliest papers to highlight the Telco Cloud concept is [198], where the authors propose a Telco Cloud model as a solution to the hardware integration and management issue. Telco Cloud offers novel options for implementing telco core functions that are both cost-effective and reliable. Virtual telecommunications aims to replace expensive dedicated equipment used to implement several centralized control plane functions and other services with distributed solutions that can be allocated on-demand across a pool of dependable, dynamically contracted computing and networking resources that are easy to manage. The proposed Telco Cloud computing paradigm now includes an appropriate resource management layer. According to the authors, only a subset of applications are compatible with the Telco Cloud platform. If an application does not meet the requirements for distribution, it should be removed from the Telco Cloud. These applications are referred to as legacy software. The Telco Cloud architecture is divided into five distinct layers, according to [199]. Each of these layers has a few sub-segments that may or may not have partners.