학술논문

Elastic Provisioning of Stateful Telco Services in Mobile Cloud Networking
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Services Computing IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. Services Computing, IEEE Transactions on. 14(3):710-723 Jun, 2021
Subject
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Cloud computing
Proposals
Network function virtualization
Data centers
Databases
5G mobile communication
Resource management
service state migration
virtual machine and containers
service provisioning
service composition
mobile cloud networking
network function virtualization
resource management
Language
ISSN
1939-1374
2372-0204
Abstract
Several relevant research and innovation activities have recently investigated the technical and economic advantages of cloud computing for the provisioning of telco service infrastructures, in particular towards all-IP next generation 5G networks. In fact, the evolution of telco service infrastructures traditionally requires a significant upfront investment (and a long adoption process). Conversely, cloud exploitation significantly lowers investment risks by potentially providing elasticity in service provisioning via flexible Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure. In this context, the paper presents novel solutions that we have designed, implemented, and evaluated within the EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project (MCN). Their aim is to achieve cost-effective elastic provisioning of telco services over heterogeneous and federated cloud providers, with the specific focus of supporting the extreme quality levels that are demanded by traditional, non-virtualized, and dedicated telco infrastructures. In particular, we concentrate on how to effectively and efficiently automate service state migration for coarse-grained telco service (cloudified) components by leveraging industry-mature orchestration technologies and cloud management frameworks. While our proposed state migration model and procedure are general, its implementation is experimented for MCN's Rating, Charging, and Billing as a Service (RCBaaS). This MCN functionality has been chosen by purpose due to its challenging reliability and uptime requirements. The reported experimental and simulation results show the technical feasibility of the proposed solution under different and realistic load conditions for next-generation and cloudified 5G services.