LUMEN: A global fault management framework for network virtualization environments

Abstract

The advent of 5G and its ever increasing stringent requirements for bandwidth, latency, and quality of service pushes the boundaries of what is feasible with legacy Mobile Network Operators' technologies. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is one promising attempt at solving some of those challenges that were widely adopted by the industry and the standardization bodies. At its essence, NFV is about running network functions as software workloads on commodity hardware to optimize deployment costs and simplify the life-cycle management of network functions. However, it introduces new fault management challenges including dynamic topology, multi-tenant fault isolation and data consistency and ambiguity; that we propose to define in this paper. To tackle those challenges, we extend the classical fault management process to the virtualized functions by introducing LUMEN: a Global Fault Management Framework. Our approach aims at providing the availability and reliability of the virtualized 5G end-to-end service chain. LUMEN includes the canonical steps of the fault management process and proposes a monitoring solution for all types of Network virtualization Environments. Our framework is based on open source solutions and could easily be integrated with other existing autonomic management models.

A Survey of Fault Management in Network Virtualization Environments: Challenges and Solutions

“…However, with virtualization, the topology becomes dynamic which complicates the extraction of a generic model. Consequently, Sánchez et al [69] and Cherrared et al [70], proposed the use of the topology knowledge extracted from the controller in the case of SDN and from VIM and monitoring tools in the case of NFV, respectively. To model SDN components, Sánchez et al [69], define two types of templates: the network node template and the link template.…”

“…A template instantiation algorithm is then used to model the network according to the topology knowledge from controllers. Cherrared et al [70], proposed a monitoring framework to provide real time topology data in NVE. This data will help providing a diagnosis model that matches the actual topology.…”

“…In most recent works, framework blocks are replaced by Opensource tools that provide the required functions. More recent efforts [70,76,83,97,98], proposed fault management frameworks for NVEs. For instance, Luchian et al [98], used Openstack as a VIM for NFV and Nagios to collect the Available Transfer Rates and One-Way Delays of the links within the cloud, in order to provide the optimization of the Network Virtualization Functions.…”

“…The diagnosis process is based on templates to express the different rules used for the RCA (RCA). Cherrared et al [70], proposed LUMEN a global FM framework for NVE. LUMEN is a four-layer framework (i.e., source, sink, extraction and decision), the first three layers defined for network data monitoring are ensured by the Opensource Elastic stack [94].…”

SAKURA a Model Based Root Cause Analysis Framework for vIMS (poster)

“…This generic patterns are then instantiated according to the current network topology. • Observations: represent the alarms and logs of Clearwater components that we collect from each network function, the real-time status of components and the network health reports collected from the Clearwater live-test [8] [9]. The main procedures of SAKURA framework are the selfmodeling and the RCA algorithm: 1) Self-modeling: represents the action of generating automatically a model.…”