Mobile Network Operators provide wireless communication services to their customers using their own network infrastructures. For providers, in particular in low income countries, access to latest network functions to offer 4G/5G services can be a large burden as this is directly impacted by financial restrictions of operators. Although some network sharing solutions between operators to reduce the total cost of ownership exist in standards and literature, none address specific requirements of the operating environment of low income countries. In our approach, we are exploiting the raising interest in the cloudification of the related infrastructure, namely Network Function Virtualization (NFV) over Software Defined Networks (SDN), to allow each operator in these countries to offer specific network functions as a service in a federation in order to share them and to increase their revenue. Initial results are presented based on the development of a commercial toolkit (OpenSDNCore) and a federated testbed research project (TRESCIMO). As a result, we define the notion of a Mobile Federated Network Operator (MFNO) and provide an analysis of the underlying requirements for such a use case and potential approaches to address them.
The proliferation of cloud computing techniques has created a multitude of applications for network services deployments, enabled by the adoption of Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) paradigms. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) also have the opportunity to leverage these technologies to enable the delivery of traditional networking functionality making use of cloud technologies. The benefit is cost reduction in the CAPEX and OPEX of the network infrastructure. Furthermore, multiple MNOs could share Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) while maintaining separate logical data and control planes. This work investigates how those VNFs, in particular the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Network Service (NS), can be shared using Virtual Tenant Networks (VTN) techniques. VTN provides a logical separation between data and control plane in virtualized networks. The design, implementation, and preliminary evaluations of such deployments are showcased in this paper, using open-source tools and readily available research playgrounds.
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