5G wireless communication envisions unprecedented changes in current mobile networks in order to guarantee significant higher performance mainly in terms of data rates, latencies and efficiency. This paper provides an analytical model based on stochastic geometry, in order to address the planning and the dimensioning of 5G Cloud RAN. The results shows the requirements in terms of number of virtual baseband units, and the energy gain achieved by virtualisation both in micro-cell and pico-cell scenarios. Thus, the proposed methodology represents a step forward to analyse and compare traditional RAN design with the emerging Cloud RAN paradigm.
Software-defined networking decouples control and data plane in softwarized networks. This allows for centralized management of the network, but complete centralization of the controller functions raises potential issues related to failure, latency, and scalability. Distributed controller deployment is adopted to optimize scalability and latency problems. However, existing controllers are monolithic, resulting in code inefficiency for distributed deployment. Some seminal ongoing efforts have been proposed with the idea of disaggregating the SDN controller architecture into an assembly of various subsystems, each of which can be responsible for a certain controller task. These subsystems are typically implemented as microservices and deployed as virtual network functions, in particular as Docker Containers. This enables flexible deployment of controller functions. However, these proposals (e.g., $$\mu$$
μ
ONOS) are still in their early stage of design and development, so that a full decomposition of the SDN controller is not been available yet. To fill that gap, this article derives some important design guidelines to decompose an SDN controller into a set of microservices. Next, it also proposes a microservices-based decomposed controller architecture, foreseeing communications issues between the controller sub-functions. These design and performance considerations are also proven via the implementation of the proposed architecture as a solution, called Micro-Services based SDN controller (MSN), based on the Ryu SDN controller. Moreover, MSN includes different network communication protocols, such as gRPC, WebSocket, and REST-API. Finally, we show experimental results that highlight the robustness and latency of the system on a networking testbed. Collected results prove the main pros and cons of each network communication protocol and an evaluation of our proposal in terms of system resilience, scalability and latency.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.