MeDICINE: Rapid prototyping of production-ready network services in multi-PoP environments

Abstract

Virtualized network services consisting of multiple individual network functions are already today deployed across multiple sites, so called multi-PoP (points of presence) environments. This allows to improve service performance by optimizing its placement in the network. But prototyping and testing of these complex distributed software systems becomes extremely challenging. The reason is that not only the network service as such has to be tested but also its integration with management and orchestration systems. Existing solutions, like simulators, basic network emulators, or local cloud testbeds, do not support all aspects of these tasks.To this end, we introduce MeDICINE, a novel NFV prototyping platform that is able to execute production-ready network functions, provided as software containers, in an emulated multi-PoP environment. These network functions can be controlled by any third-party management and orchestration system that connects to our platform through standard interfaces. Based on this, a developer can use our platform to prototype and test complex network services in a realistic environment running on his laptop.

Verification and validation framework for 5G network services and apps

“…Thus, there are still many manual tests required by developers, system integrators, and service operators to actually check if their services will work correctly on the target platform. Other tools for SDN and NFV testing provide extensive debugging and prototyping functionalities but focus on the initial development phase rather than on automatic qualification of VNFs and services [11], [12].…”

“…To perform the blackbox tests mentioned before, an execution environment is required in which the SUT is deployed and executed and can be stimulated, for example, by sending test traffic to its interfaces and observing the outputs. We explicitly do not fix our V&V platform to a single test execution environment but allow it to interface with multiple different environments ranging from small emulated platforms [12] to full-featured network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) setups [15] which may be configured as generic testing platforms following pre-defined standards or operator-specific guidelines. For example, a small emulated execution environment running on the service developer's laptop only offers support to do very simplistic functional tests, e.g., to check if configuration interfaces of a NS work like expected.…”

A flexible multi-pop infrastructure emulator for carrier-grade MANO systems

“…A quick and low-cost network function virtualization infrastructure (NFVI) and MANO system testbed emulation mechanism, as described in step 1 to 4, is therefore extremely desirable. In previous work [6], we presented MeDICINE as highly configurable NFVI emulator. In this demo we showcase its recent extensions to support multiple MANO frameworks allowing interoperability tests between developed network services and MANO systems.…”

“…In this demo, we will show how a network service developer can utilize our multi-PoP infrastructure emulation platform, called MeDICINE [6], to quickly setup NFV test environments for arbitrary network services. After motivating this work by outlining the challenges of NFV development and test processes in Section II, we give more details about our NFV emulation platform and the used abstractions to integrate with existing MANO systems in Section III.…”

Automated monitoring and detection of resource-limited NFV-based services

“…• Automated VNF profiling: As indicated in [8] and [9], the MANO framework can be used to test and quantify the performance of a VNF under bounded resources. During this VNF profiling, multiple performance and resource consumption metrics are measured under varying input load.…”