NET 1: Network Softwarisation I
Wednesday, 9 June 2021, 11:30-13:00, Zoom Room
Session Chair: Ana Aguiar (Univ. Porto, Portugal)
Monitoring as a Service over a 5G Network Slice
Dimitris Giannopoulos, Panagiotis Papaioannou, Christos Tranoris and Spyros Denazis (University of Patras, Greece)
Network slicing, i.e. multiple virtual networks running on a common infrastructure, is considered a key mechanism to serve the multitude of tenants (e.g. vertical industries) targeted by forthcoming fifth generation (5G) systems, in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. It is predicted that one of the most popular models for customers will be the Network Slice as a Service (NSaaS) model. This model allows a Network Service Customer to order and configure a Network Slice and offered it as a service. However, ensuring that the agreed SLA for the delivered Network Slice is fulfilled, monitoring and telemetry mechanisms need to be enabled at various resource levels: the Programmable Infrastructure, the 5G Core and RAN and the resources of the NS. This work presents an approach to deliver such monitoring and telemetry mechanisms as a service for the emerging 5G NSaaS delivery model.
PiEdge: An Edge-Driven PaaS Model for Network Slicing Automation
Alexios Lekidis (Intracom Telecom, Greece); Vasileios Theodorou (Intracom S.A. Telecom Solutions, Greece); Nikolaos Psaromanolakis (Intracom Telecom, Greece); Carmen Guerrero (University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain); Diego Lopez (Telefonica I+D, Spain)
A recently proposed direction that is pursued by standardization organizations for 5G Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies at the core of next-generation works (5G and beyond) is the adoption of “Cloud-native” design principles. These principles are catalyzed by Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions that allow re-usability of common or dedicated Virtual Network Functions, in order to fulfil the diverse vertical requirements for network slices. PaaS solutions can also be extended to Multi-access Edge Computing environments (i.e. at the edge of the cellular network) to take advantage of predefined edge-based network functions and services and to decouple their lifecycle management from centralized, delay-introducing operations. Currently, core-to-edge coordination for end-to-end network slicing, from 5G Core Network to the edge, takes place at a very low abstraction level, leading to significant overheads that pose scalability and latency threats, especially crucial for mission-critical applications. To tackle this challenge, we describe a methodology for automating the interaction between the NFV MANO and edge platforms that encompass PaaS functions at the edge. The methodology offers benefits for 1) eliminating configuration, integration and management effort for end-to-end network slicing, and 2) the exposure of edge resources to the NFV MANO as usable platform services. We showcase the automation and management overhead benefits of our solution through experiments on an edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) use case, deployed at the 5G-VINNI Spanish 5G Facility site.
Ruben Ricart-Sanchez (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Pablo Salva-Garcia (University West Of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Enrique Chirivella-Perez (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Jose Maria Alcaraz Calero (University of the West of Scotland & School of Engineering and Computing, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Qi Wang (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain))
With 5G being currently deployed worldwide, research into 6G has been initiated to advance the key technologies of 5G to the next level. Network slicing, as a cornerstone technology in 5G, is expected to continue playing an important role in guaranteeing the Quality of Service for various vertical business use cases with divergent yet more demanding requirements in the next generation. This research explores a towards 6G scenario where ultra-high performance of backbone network slicing is entailed as part of an end-to-end solution to address ultra-reliable low-latency communications in mission-critical industrial operations for smart factory and manufacturing, smart warehouse and other Industry 4.0 and beyond applications. To address the highly demanding requirements, this paper proposes a new hardware-based network slicing approach based on the eXpress Data Path (XDP). The proposed solution is designed, prototyped and compared with an existing hardware-based alternative through empirical experiments over a pre-6G infrastructure testbed. The insights gained from the experimentation would help cast light on hardware-accelerated approaches in 6G network slicing.
5Growth: Secure and Reliable Network Slicing for Verticals
Vitor A Cunha (Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal); Nikolaos Maroulis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece); Chrysa Papagianni (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands); Javier Sacido and Manuel Angel Jimenez (Telcaria Ideas, Spain); Fabio Ubaldi (Ericsson, Italy); Molka Gharbaoui (CNIT, Italy); Chia-Yu Chang (Nokia Bell Labs, Belgium); Nikolaos Koursioumpas (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece); Konstantin Tomakh (Mirantis, Ukraine); Daniel Corujo (Instituto de Telecomunicações Aveiro & Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal); João Paulo Barraca (University of Aveiro & Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal); Sokratis Barmpounakis (University of Athens, Greece); Denys Kucherenko (Mirantis, Ukraine); Alessio Giorgetti (National Research Council of Italy, Italy); Andrea Boddi (Ericsson, Italy); Luca Valcarenghi (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy); Oleksii Kolodiazhnyi (Mirantis, Ukraine); Aitor Zabala (Telcaria Ideas S. L., Spain); Josep Xavier Salvat and Andres Garcia-Saavedra (NEC Labs Europe, Germany)
Network slicing is well-recognized as a core 5G technology to enable heterogeneous vertical services sharing the same infrastructure. In this context, the H2020 5Growth project extends baseline 5G management and orchestration platforms to manage the life-cycle of real end-to-end, reliable, and secure network slices with performance guarantees. In this paper, we present 5Growth’s approaches to (i) attain isolation across network slices, (ii) provide secure interfaces towards third parties, and (iii) exploit AI/ML to achieve reliability through automated anomaly detection. In our quest towards validating full-fledged 5G pilots, we demonstrate our slicing mechanisms in PoCs that include interacting with ICT-17 infrastructure.
Intent-Based E2E Network Slice Management for Industry 4.0
Enrique Chirivella-Perez (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Pablo Salva-Garcia (University West Of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Ruben Ricart-Sanchez (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Jose Maria Alcaraz Calero (University of the West of Scotland & School of Engineering and Computing, United Kingdom (Great Britain)); Qi Wang (University of the West of Scotland, United Kingdom (Great Britain))
Fifth generation(5G) provides one of the cornerstone features in networking, network slicing enables multiplexing virtualised logical networks over the same infrastructure for multiple business services. This research work provides the design and implementation of a novel E2E network slice management framework capable of managing the deployment E2E network slices across the 5G/Pre-6G infrastructure. The contribution has been validated for Industry 4.0 use cases where both horizontal and vertical slicing have been validated. This framework has been designed, prototyped, and empirically validate over a multi-tenant 5G/Pre-6G network infrastructure using the requirements of an Industry 4.0 use case: a production pipeline. The provisioning of a network slice in more than 8096 nodes has been carried out in less than half a second which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
