Design and implementation of a data aggregation system for the 5G network management plane
Mendoza Sánchez, José Luís · 2021
5G networks have led to an increase in the complexity of the management plane. In order to achieve a smart and efficient management of 5G networks, new monitoring mechanisms are required. The main problem is the huge number of data sources that exist and their heterogeneity, with their own mechanisms and formats to represent the information. We will leverage the ETSI ISG Context Information Management framework (CIM) standard, which will enable high interoperability with other monitoring systems. In this work, we propose a generic architecture which allows us to aggregate and unify all this data to distribute it among interested subscribers with different purposes (e.g., data analysis, visualization). We have developed two prototypes that implement the forementioned architecture: one of them uses a NGSI-LD Context Broker from the ETSI ISG CIM standard, and the other uses Apache Kafka, an event streaming platform, as the distribution broker. We have conducted an experiment involving the two prototypes to compare them and check which fits better in a network monitoring scenario. The results have shown that, while the NGSI-LD Context Brokers are feasible in scenarios with low loads of data, the Kafka solution fits better in scenarios with high loads of data, as it could be the case of network monitoring. Finally, we will develop another implementation of the proposed architecture to be used in a real use case scenario of the monitoring of the 5G network. For the developing of all mentioned solutions, we will use Apache NiFi, a data engineering tool.