Towards delay-aware container-based Service Function Chaining in Fog Computing

Recently, the fifth-generation mobile network (5G) is getting significant attention. Empowered by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), 5G networks aim to support diverse services coming from different business verticals (e.g. Smart Cities, Automotive, etc). To fully leverage on NFV, services must be connected in a specific order forming a Service Function Chain (SFC). SFCs allow mobile operators to benefit from the high flexibility and low operational costs introduced by network softwarization. Additionally, Cloud computing is evolving towards a distributed paradigm called Fog Computing, which aims to provide a distributed cloud infrastructure by placing computational resources close to end-users. However, most SFC research only focuses on Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) use cases where mobile operators aim to deploy services close to end-users. Bi-directional communication between Edges and Cloud are not considered in MEC, which in contrast is highly important in a Fog environment as in distributed anomaly detection services. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an SFC controller to optimize the placement of service chains in Fog environments, specifically tailored for Smart City use cases. Our approach has been validated on the Kubernetes platform, an open-source orchestrator for the automatic deployment of micro-services. Our SFC controller has been implemented as an extension to the scheduling features available in Kubernetes, enabling the efficient provisioning of container-based SFCs while optimizing resource allocation and reducing the end-to-end (E2E) latency. Results show that the proposed approach can lower the network latency up to 18% for the studied use case while conserving bandwidth when compared to the default scheduling mechanism

A Virtual Network PaaS for 3GPP 4G and Beyond Core Network Services

Cloud computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are emerging as key technologies to overcome the challenges facing 4G and beyond mobile systems. Over the last few years, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has gained momentum and has become more widely adopted throughout IT enterprises. It simplifies the applications provisioning and accelerates time-to-market while lowering costs. Telco can leverage the same model to provision the 4G and beyond core network services using NFV technology. However, many challenges have to be addressed, mainly due to the specificities of network services. This paper proposes an architecture for a Virtual Network Platform-as-a-Service (VNPaaS) to provision 3GPP 4G and beyond core network services in a distributed environment. As an illustrative use case, the proposed architecture is employed to provision the 3GPP Home Subscriber Server (HSS) as-a-Service (HSSaaS). The HSSaaS is built from Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) resulting from a novel decomposition of HSS. A prototype is implemented and early measurements are made.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, 5th IEEE International Conference on Cloud Networking (IEEE CloudNet 2016

Design and analysis of fully virtualized cellular networks based on open-source frameworks

Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i InfraestructuraObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::17 - Aliança per a Aconseguir els Objetiu

Orchestration Mechanism Impact on Virtual Network Function Throughput

Virtual Network Function (VNF) has gained importance in the IT industry, especially in the telecommunication industry, because a VNF runs network services in commodity hardware instead of dedicated hardware, thereby increasing the scalability and agility. The container technology is a useful tool for the VNF because it is lightweight, portable and scalable. The container technology shortens the product development cycle by easing the service deployment and maintenance. The telecommunication industry uses service uptime as an important gauge to evaluate if a service is of carrier grade, and keeping services up and running generates most of the maintenance costs. These costs can be reduced by container orchestration such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes handles the automation of deployment, scaling and management for applications with the help of orchestration mechanisms, such as the scheduler and load-balancers. As a result of those mechanisms, the VNFs running in a Kubernetes cluster can reach high availability and flexibility. However, the impact of the mechanisms on VNF throughput has not been studied in detail. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the influence of Kubernetes orchestration mechanisms on VNF throughput and Quality of Service (QoS). This objective is achieved by means of measurements run with a packet-forwarding service in a Kubernetes cluster. Based on the evaluations, it is concluded that the VNF throughput is dependent on 6 parameters: CPU types, CPU isolation, number of Pods, location of Pods, location of load-balancer controllers, and load-balancing techniques

CN2F: A Cloud-Native Cellular Network Framework

Upcoming 5G and Beyond 5G (B5G) cellular networks aim to improve the efficiency and flexibility of mobile networks by incorporating various technologies, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and Network Slicing (NS). In this paper, we share our findings, accompanied by a comprehensive online codebase, about the best practice of using different open-source projects in order to realize a flexible testbed for academia and industrial Research and Development (R&D) activities on the future generation of cellular networks. In particular, a Cloud-Native Cellular Network Framework (CN2F) is presented which uses OpenAirInterface's codebase to generate cellular Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and deploys Kubernetes to disperse and manage them among some worker nodes. Moreover, CN2F leverages ONOS and Mininet to emulate the effect of the IP transport networks in the fronthaul and backhaul of real cellular networks. In this paper, we also showcase two use cases of CN2F to demonstrate the importance of Edge Computing (EC) and the capability of Radio Access Network (RAN) slicing

Orchestrating Service Migration for Low Power MEC-Enabled IoT Devices

Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a key enabling technology for Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks. MEC facilitates distributed cloud computing capabilities and information technology service environment for applications and services at the edges of mobile networks. This architectural modification serves to reduce congestion, latency, and improve the performance of such edge colocated applications and devices. In this paper, we demonstrate how reactive service migration can be orchestrated for low-power MEC-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Here, we use open-source Kubernetes as container orchestration system. Our demo is based on traditional client-server system from user equipment (UE) over Long Term Evolution (LTE) to the MEC server. As the use case scenario, we post-process live video received over web real-time communication (WebRTC). Next, we integrate orchestration by Kubernetes with S1 handovers, demonstrating MEC-based software defined network (SDN). Now, edge applications may reactively follow the UE within the radio access network (RAN), expediting low-latency. The collected data is used to analyze the benefits of the low-power MEC-enabled IoT device scheme, in which end-to-end (E2E) latency and power requirements of the UE are improved. We further discuss the challenges of implementing such schemes and future research directions therein

Orchestration and Lifecycle Management over Virtualized Network Functions

A crescente evolução da nova geração de redes móveis aproxima a comercialização de redes de quinta geração da realidade. Os operadores móveis já dizem possuir dispositivos preparados para o 5G e já demonstram protótipos de serviços criados e sustentados para estas redes. Na realidade, as Redes de Acesso Radio (Radio Access Network - RAN) planeadas para o 5G já estão desenvolvidas e testadas, existindo já algumas redes de acesso radio com novas antenas preparadas para 5G em várias partes do mundo. Porém, as redes 5G vão mais além que a evolução das RAN, sendo a principal novidade desta geração de redes móvel a virtualização das redes centrais, incluindo nestas serviços e funções de rede. A Virtualização de Funções de Rede (Network Function Virtualization - NFV) está a ser normalizada pela European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). Esta tecnologia está a ser usada pela 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) para normalizar as redes 5G, nomeadamente a virtualização das suas redes centrais. A virtualização não só irá permitir o surgimento de novos serviços e funções de rede como também permitirá virtualizar serviços e funções de rede antigas. A virtualização não só irá melhorar significativamente as redes móveis, como também será mais fácil a gestão e a orquestração destas. Em Portugal, o consórcio 5GO, que envolve várias empresas com uma vasta experiência de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento (Research & Development - R&D) na área de Telecomunicações, desenvolve o projeto Mobilizador 5G. Esta iniciativa portuguesa visa desenvolver soluções inovadoras para a rede 5G. Esta dissertação aborda inicialmente uma análise às tecnologias que permitem as redes 5G. De seguida foca-se nas plataformas de gestão e orquestração de redes existentes e por fim, nas operações de gestão de ciclo de vida (Lifecycle Management - LCM) que estas plataformas poderão realizar nas funções de redes. O objetivo final será testar e analisar essas operações em funções de rede através de uma das plataformas existentes.The growing evolution of the new mobile generation networks brings the commercialization of 5th generation networks closer to reality. Mobile operators already claim to have 5G-ready devices and already demonstrate prototypes of services created and sustained for these networks. In fact, the Radio Access Network (RAN) planned for 5G are already developed and tested, and there are already some radio access networks with new 5G-ready antennas in diverse parts of the world. However, 5G networks go beyond the evolution of RANs, with the main novelty of this mobile network generation being the virtualisation of central networks, including in these services and network functions. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is being standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). This technology is being used by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) to standardise 5G networks, particularly the virtualisation of core networks. Virtualization will not only allow the development of new network services and functions, it will also allow the virtualization of legacy network services and functions. Virtualization will not only significantly improve mobile networks, but also make it easier to manage and orchestrate them. In Portugal, the 5GO consortium, which involves several companies with a vast experience in Research & Development (R&D) in the area of Telecommunications, develops the project Mobilizador 5G. This Portuguese initiative aims to develop innovative solutions for the 5G network. This dissertation initially addresses an analysis of the technologies that enable 5G networks. It then focuses on the existing network management and orchestration platforms and, finally, on the Lifecycle Management (LCM) operations that these platforms can perform in network functions. The final objective will be to test and analyse these operations in network functions through one of the existing platforms

A Comparative Study of Virtual Infrastructure Management Solutions for UAV Networks

Proceeding of 7th Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications (DroNet) (Dronet'21), June 24, 2021, Virtual, WI, USA, co-located with ACM MobiSys 2021.The promising combination of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with network virtualisation technologies has positively shown many advantages enabling the deployment of communication services over aerial networks, that is, networks conformed by a set of interconnected UAVs. However, this synergy may certainly involve diverse challenges that must be carefully considered. In this respect, this paper compares some of the most common virtual infrastructure management solutions that could potentially be used to deal with virtualised payloads over aerial networks, identifying their main strength and limitations. The paper also presents a preliminary exploration on the utilisation of the Kubernetes virtual infrastructure management platform to support value-added services over UAV networks, showing off its potential as a suitable platform to this purpose.We would like to thank Andrew Mcgregor, Bob Briscoe and Rubén Cuevas Rumín for providing helpful information and comments. The work of Anna Maria Mandalari has been funded by the EU FP7 METRICS (607728) project. The work of Marcelo Bagnulo has been funded by the EU FP7 Trilogy2 (317756) project.Publicad

On the Fly Orchestration of Unikernels: Tuning and Performance Evaluation of Virtual Infrastructure Managers

Network operators are facing significant challenges meeting the demand for more bandwidth, agile infrastructures, innovative services, while keeping costs low. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud Computing are emerging as key trends of 5G network architectures, providing flexibility, fast instantiation times, support of Commercial Off The Shelf hardware and significant cost savings. NFV leverages Cloud Computing principles to move the data-plane network functions from expensive, closed and proprietary hardware to the so-called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper we deal with the management of virtual computing resources (Unikernels) for the execution of VNFs. This functionality is performed by the Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) in the NFV MANagement and Orchestration (MANO) reference architecture. We discuss the instantiation process of virtual resources and propose a generic reference model, starting from the analysis of three open source VIMs, namely OpenStack, Nomad and OpenVIM. We improve the aforementioned VIMs introducing the support for special-purpose Unikernels and aiming at reducing the duration of the instantiation process. We evaluate some performance aspects of the VIMs, considering both stock and tuned versions. The VIM extensions and performance evaluation tools are available under a liberal open source licence