An experimental publish-subscribe monitoring assessment to Beyond 5G networks

Abstract

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks is designed to accommodate different types of use cases, each of them with different and stringent requirements and key performance indicators (KPIs). To support the optimization of the network performance and validation of the KPIs, there exist the necessity of a flexible and efficient monitoring system and capable of realizing multi-site and multi-stakeholder scenarios. Nevertheless, for the evolution from 5G to 6G, the network is envisioned as a user-driven, distributed Cloud computing system where the resource pool is foreseen to integrate the participating users. In this paper, we present a distributed monitoring architecture for Beyond 5G multi-site platforms, where different stakeholders share the resource pool in a distributed environment. Taking advantage of the usage of publish-subscribe mechanisms adapted to the Edge, the developed lightweight monitoring solution can manage large amounts of real-time traffic generated by the applications located in the resource pool. We assess the performance of the implemented paradigm, revealing some interesting insights about the platform, such as the effect caused by the throughput of monitoring data in performance parameters such as the latency and packet loss, or the presence of a saturation effect due to software limitations that impacts in the performance of the system under specific conditions. In the end, the performance evaluation process has confirmed that the monitoring platform suits the requirements of the proposed scenarios, being capable of handling similar workloads in real 5G and Beyond 5G scenarios, then discussing how the architecture could be mapped to these real scenarios.

Monitoring Platform Evolution towards Serverless Computing for 5G and Beyond Systems

“…In [6], [15], the design principles of the monitoring architecture under study are presented, together with a preliminary performance evaluation to characterize the platform in terms of some performance parameters, such as latency and packet loss. In [13] the platform, shown in Figure 1, is used to carry out a preliminary performance comparison between different virtualization technologies, including serverless-related technologies, such as Kata Containers or Firecracker, but not including other popular serverless platforms as OpenFaas, which will be considered in this work to redesign some modules of the target platform using a serverless approach, feasible for Beyond 5G systems.…”

“…The experiments run by different stakeholders are differentiated through the generation of different topics, and monitoring data are published to them. An experiment, including not Thus, the analysis presented in this paper stems from the work carried out in [6], [13], [15]. We will expand the analysis by addressing both data plane and management plane for the monitoring platform, evaluating the most suitable technology choices for each environment.…”

“…This paper is meant to be a further development of the work presented in [13], in which we compared the performance of several virtualization technologies used to deploy a 5G multi-site and multi-stakeholder monitoring platform. For this preliminary comparison, we used the VM-based platform developed in the 5G EVE project [14], whose monitoring framework allows implementing the distribution and consumption of metrics and KPIs for 5G multi-site platforms [6], [15] through a publish/subscribe approach using Apache Kafka 1 , which demonstrated to be effective. Driven by the promising results obtained by using different virtualization technologies in [13] for implementing the communication system in charge of delivering streams of monitoring data to data collectors, in this paper we significantly extend the analysis.…”

“…Previous work covered the introduction and first analysis of the 5G monitoring platform, based on a set of VMs [6], as well as an initial performance comparison between different virtualization technologies including recent lightweight technologies, such as Kata Containers and Firecracker [13]. This work significantly advances these results.…”

Monitoring Platform Evolution Toward Serverless Computing for 5G and Beyond Systems

“…Indeed, the increasing volume of data coming from IoT devices is going to be processed in a distributed way on B5G platforms, relying on an Edge/Fog layer in the architecture. Hence, the importance of monitoring services collecting and analyzing data generated by the different elements involved in B5G systems, and generating the KPI values suitable for vertical customers, is clear [6]. These platforms need to be lightweight and flexible to be easily deployable in Edge environments, and should limit the resource allocation for their modules.…”