Abstract
With the increasing demand for openness, flexibility, and monetization the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) of mobile network functions has become the embracing factor for most mobile network operators. Early reported field deployments of virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC) - the core network component of 4G LTE and 5G non-standalone mobile networks - reflect this growing trend. To best meet the requirements of power management, load balancing, and fault tolerance in the cloud environment, the need for live migration for these virtualized components cannot be shunned. Virtualization platforms of interest include both Virtual Machines (VMs) and Containers, with the latter option offering more lightweight characteristics. The first contribution of this paper is the implementation of a number of custom functions that enable migration of Containers supporting virtualized EPC components. The current CRIU-based migration of Docker Container does not fully support the mobile network protocol stack. CRIU extensions to support the mobile network protocol stack are therefore required and described in the paper. The second contribution is an experimental-based comprehensive analysis of live migration in two backhaul network settings and two virtualization technologies. The two backhaul network settings are the one provided by CloudLab and one based on a programmable optical network testbed that makes use of OpenROADM dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) equipment. The paper compares the migration performance of the proposed implementation of OpenAirInterface (OAI) based containerized EPC components with the one utilizing VMs, running in OpenStack. The presented experimental comparison accounts for a number of system parameters and configurations, image size of the virtualized EPC components, network characteristics, and signal propagation time across the OpenROADM backhaul network.
Highlights
T HE 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards for the 5G mobile communication and the ETSI Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [1] are two key enablers for 5G virtualization
It must be noted that Checkpoint and Restore In Userspace (CRIU) with the widelyused runC based containerized software package does not offer two key migration functionalities [16]: i) support for the Stream Controlled Transmission Protocol (SCTP) used in the LTE network to guarantee message delivery between Management Entity (MME) and eNB, and ii) GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP) device-specific information needed by the Serving and Packet Gateway (SPGW) software to provide tunneling of the user data traffic
TESTBED The live migration solutions in Section IV are implemented in a geographically distributed testbed where the Radio Access Network (RAN) components are hosted in the UTDLab (Dallas) and the core network (CN) components are hosted in CloudLab (Utah) [40]
Summary
T HE 3GPP standards for the 5G mobile communication and the ETSI Network Function Virtualization (NFV) [1] are two key enablers for 5G virtualization. Being able to live migrate the VNFs of the vEPC offers a number of significant advantages, including (i) achieving load balancing in the compute nodes [9] by timely redistributing VNFs to sparsely loaded servers, (ii) effectively performing regular maintenance — such as upgrading OS versions and changing network configurations — and (iii) effectively handling fault management. These features may prove to be of the essence to cope with the highly fluctuating mobile traffic that is expected in real-time networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of live migration of core network components in the containerized environment and head-tohead comparison with the VM environment
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