مجازی سازی و هماهنگ سازی یک شبکه هسته ای بسته 5G Virtualising and Orchestrating a 5G Evolved Packet Core Network

I. INTRODUCTION Essential for Fifth Generation (5G) multi-access mobile networks, Network function virtualisation [1] and orchestration enable automatic management and orchestration in a flexible manner [2]. To efficiently manage the total cost of ownership of a mobile network, operators need to be able to rapidly deploy core infrastructure on off-the-shelf, multi-vendor, enterprise blades, which run a variety of 5G Virtualised Network Functions (VNF). The University of Surrey setup the joint industry/academic 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) in 2015. Campus-wide 5G mobile network infrastructure comprises an ultra-dense outdoor network, indoor coverage of two floors of the 5GIC building and a new core network architecture, designed around 5G use-cases [2], developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) alliance [3], International Telecommunication Union Telecommunications standardisation sector (ITU-T), and the 5G infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP). Current 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC), using for-purpose hardware elements, is difficult to scale to meet service demands. The 5GIC has developed techniques to virtualise and orchestrate the core of the 5G mobile network. Orchestration providing a single management view of the entire environment has the potential to reduce operational costs compared to today’s multiple purpose-specific management; virtualisation of network functions and compute resources allows optimum placement of components compared to the current fixed network layout. A Flat Distributed Cloud (FDC) architecture is presented; split control/user planes allow traffic to be dynamically directed to separate network functions as demonstrated on the Campus-wide, near real-world LTE network. This paper details the experience and lessons learned in virtualising and orchestrating the experimental 5G mobile core at 5GIC (Section II), presenting initial test results of the impact of virtualisation. Network core virtualisation is explained in Section III. Section IV presents proof-of-concept performance results; Section V discusses the lessons learnt; key achievements and recommendations in Section VI, Section VII concludes the paper.