Abstract
Future large-scale network function virtualization (NFV) environments will be based on hundreds or even thousands of NFV infrastructure installations, the so called points of presence (PoP). All their resources and the services deployed on top of them will be controlled by management and orchestration (MANO) systems. Such large-scale scenarios need to be automatically tested during the development phase of a MANO system. This task becomes very challenging because large-scale NFV testbeds are hard to maintain, too expensive, or simply not available.In this paper, we introduce the concept of emulation-based smoke testing, which enables automated, large-scale testing of MANO systems. We show that our test platform prototype can easily emulate up to 1024 PoPs on a single physical machine and that it can reduce the setup time of a single test PoP by a factor of 232 × compared to a DevStack-based PoP installation. In a case study, we test and compare two versions of a state-of-the-art MANO solution, namely ETSI’s Open Source MANO (OSM), in large-scale scenarios using our prototype. The issues we found in this study would not have been discovered with existing, lab-scale test environments.
Highlights
Network softwarization and its underlying technologies, like software-defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), are one of the key concepts of the upcoming fifth generation of networks (5G)
FOUR, and compared them, and analyzed the runtimes of our novel, European Communications Standards Institute (ETSI)-compliant test suite executed against Open Source MANO (OSM)
The results show that the request times are all very stable and the use of our emulation platform allows to execute a complete test run in about 67.03 s, which is a result of the fast instantiation times of virtualized network function (VNF) and network services
Summary
Network softwarization and its underlying technologies, like software-defined networks (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), are one of the key concepts of the upcoming fifth generation of networks (5G). Besides basic lifecycle management (LCM) tasks, MANO systems are responsible for performing more complex orchestration tasks, like scaling, self-healing, or failover management [11] Those tasks are often automated and part of a closed control loop, which uses monitoring data as inputs to trigger orchestration decisions based on pre-defined policies or service-/function-specific management algorithms [12].
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More From: EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking
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