Deploying cloud‐native experimental platforms for zero‐touch management 5G and beyond networks

Abstract

An experimental framework for managing 5G and beyond networks through cloud‐native deployments and end‐to‐end monitoring is presented. The framework uses containerised network functions in a Kubernetes cluster across a multi‐domain network spanning cloud and edge hosts. End‐to‐end monitoring is demonstrated through Grafana dashboards that showcase both infrastructure resources and radio metrics in two scenarios involving UPF re‐selection and user mobility. As a third scenario, the authors demonstrate how a decision engine interacts with the experimental platform to perform zero‐touch containerised application relocation, highlighting the potential for enabling dynamic and intelligent management of 5G networks and beyond.