Sdn-based network slicing mechanism for a scalable 4g/5g core network

Funding Information: Acknowledgments: This work was supported in part by the Business Finland under the project 5G Finnish Open Research Collaboration Ecosystem (5G-FORCE) and Academy of Finland under Project No. 319003. This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020 project 5G-SMART, co-funded by the EU. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues. This information reflects the consortium’s view, but the consortium is not liable for any use that may be made of any of the information contained therein. Funding Information: This work was supported in part by the Business Finland under the project 5G Finnish Open Re-search Collaboration Ecosystem (5G-FORCE) and Academy of Finland under Project No. 319003. This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020 project 5G-SMART, co-funded by the EU. Funding Information: Funding: This work was supported in part by the Business Finland under the project 5G Finnish Open Re-search Collaboration Ecosystem (5G-FORCE) and Academy of Finland under Project No. 319003. This work has been performed in the framework of the H2020 project 5G-SMART, co-funded by the EU. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Managing the large volumes of IoT and M2M traffic requires the evaluation of the scala-bility and reliability for all the components in the end-to-end system. This includes connectivity, mobile network functions, and application or services receiving and processing the data from end devices. Firstly, this paper discusses the design of a containerized IoT and M2M application and the mechanisms for delivering automated scalability and high availability when deploying it in: (1) the edge using balenaCloud; (2) the Amazon Web Services cloud with EC2 instances; and (3) the dedi-cated Amazon Web Services IoT service. The experiments showed that there are no significant differences between edge and cloud deployments regarding resource consumption. Secondly, the solutions for scaling the 4G/5G network functions and mobile backhaul that provide the connectivity between devices and IoT/M2M applications are analyzed. In this case, the scalability and high availability of the 4G/5G components are provided by Kubernetes. The experiments showed that our proposed scaling algorithm for network slicing managed with SDN guarantees the necessary radio and network resources for end-to-end high availability.Peer reviewe