Performance Evaluation of COINS Framework for Wireless Network Automation
Ivan Boškov, Halil Yetgin, Carolina Fortuna, Mihael Mohorčič · 2021
With the evolution of mobile communications towards fifth-generation (5G) and beyond, all layers of the wireless networks are increasingly virtualized and software-controlled using automated tools. DevOps tools enabling smooth and fast testing through continuous integration (CI) and rapid deployment through continuous delivery (CD) of the software in cloud environments are permeating also communication infrastructures, eventually leading to the so-called “zero-touch network automation”. Such automation frameworks have been actively used in wireless testing infrastructures, such as FIRE and GENI. For instance, the continuous integration in wireless (COINS) technology development framework has been used in the LOG-a-TEC testbed facility of the FIRE federation. In this paper, we propose a task-based operational structure of COINS for a thorough evaluation of the time for operation (TFO) performance of each task. Moreover, we analyse the impact of different experiments and the number of nodes participating in the experiment on the TFO performance of the COINS framework. The results; i) demonstrate that the device tasks within COINS framework are the bottleneck occupying up to 92.6% of the total TFO, and ii) reveal that the TFO performances of the receive details task on the device side and the gather results task on the server side are significantly diminished with the increased number of nodes participating in the same type of experiment.