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With the increasing acceptance of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, a radical transformation is currently occurring inside network providers infrastructures. The trend of Software-based networks foreseen with the 5th Generation of Mobile Network (5G) is drastically changing requirements in terms of how networks are deployed and managed. One of the major changes requires the transaction towards a distributed infrastructure, in which nodes are built with standard commodity hardware. This rapid deployment of datacenters is paving the way towards a different type of environment in which the computational resources are deployed up to the edge of the network, referred to as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) nodes. However, MEC nodes do not usually provide enough resources for executing standard virtualization technologies typically used in large datacenters. For this reason, software containerization represents a lightweight and viable virtualization alternative for such scenarios. This paper presents an architecture based on the Open Baton Management and Orchestration (MANO) framework combining different infrastructural technologies supporting the deployment of container-based network services even at the edge of the network.

The maturity reached by virtualisation technology enabled great innovation for efficient applications and services development and delivery, independent of the underlying hardware equipment, especially with the large deployment of off-the-shelf hardware based cloud infrastructures. In order to take advantage of this technology, the existing network functions have to be developed and adapted to the new paradigm. However, traditional telecom services are still implemented on dedicated hardware resulting in high deployment and maintenance costs compared to the other already cloudified services. ETSI Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) aims to fill this gap by applying to telecom the virtualisation technologies. This paper introduces a set of three software architectures for efficient virtualisation of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) in different operator environments responding to the high level requirements of the ETSI NFV use case for virtualizing operator core network functions. Additionally, a management architecture for simplifying the deployment and runtime orchestration of such a virtual service on top of a cloud infrastructure is presented. Furthermore, one of the IMS software architectures was implemented based on the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open IMS Core, measured and evaluated on top of an OpenStack cloud

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