Network-Slice-as-a-Service Deployment Cost Assessment in an End-to-End 5G Testbed

Abstract

The next generation of mobile networks will support a wide range of service requirements over a shared virtual infrastructure. Network functions virtualization (NFV) enables the deployment of Radio Access Network (RAN) and core network functions as virtual network functions (VNFs) on commodity hardware instead of proprietary servers. The deployment of the 5G core will be orchestrated between mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and cloud infrastructure providers by middle-men Network-slice-as-a-service (NSaaS) providers that will consume Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) from the latter and offer network slices to the former. In this paper, we seek to leverage an end-to-end emulated 5G deployment to offer insight into the cost implications surrounding large-scale core network deployments. Our deployment features real-life traffic patterns corresponding to practical use cases which are fitted with network slicing models. These models are implemented in a 5G testbed to gather compute resource consumption. This data is used to formulate infrastructure procurement costs for popular cloud providers. Our results show steady patterns in compute consumption across all use cases, which we use to make high scale cost projections. In the end, we are able to observe the trade-off between cost and throughput achieved by decentralizing the network slices and offloading the user plane.