A Cloud-Native Monitoring System Enabling Scalable and Distributed Management of 5G Network Slices
Luis Sanabria-Russo, Christos V. Verikoukis · 2021
5G is expected to bring the benefits of higher speeds, lower latency and efficient resource management to evermore sectors in the economy, including services using non-3GPP Radio Access Technologies (e.g., WiFi). Such widespread adoption poses important challenges to traditional network management approaches. ETSI delivers specifications enabling the development of scalable, distributed and autonomous management solution by ways of defining Platform as a Service (PaaS) as a new NFV Object. This work implements an envisioned distributed monitoring system that leverages cross-domain PaaS resources to define management components as autonomous Closed Control Loops (CCL) in close proximity to the managed entities (e.g., virtual network functions, end-to-end network slices, 5G Core), minimizing the exchange of raw telemetry among decision-making components. Beyond the increased flexibility and overall efficiency provided by cloud-native models and tools, the presented approach suggests its irruption into the telco cloud enables the implementation of novel management approaches that adapt to services’ demands, as opposed to the other way around.