Towards Mobile Federated Network Operators

Abstract

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 Case for Federated Identity Management in 5G Communications

“…IAM and FId in the provisioning of Network Function (NF) services were discussed briefly in [2]. While NFs and sharing of network services by MNO through a federated mechanism to allow each operator to offer specific NFs to the users as a service in a federation were presented in [9] but the access of service within the HN or from EN by UE using FId have not be explored yet. The focus on FIdM has been mainly on cloud services, social networks and IoT.…”

Softwarization and virtualization in 5G mobile networks: Benefits, trends and challenges

“…which are not any more affordable considering the current mobile communication [50]. M A N U S C R I P T 11 2) Complexity: In terms of functionalities, the 4G architecture shows a clear C/U-plane separation in the E-UTRAN, but C-plane functions are frequently co-located with U-plane equipment in the backhaul/core network as for instance it happens with SGW and the PGW.…”

“…7 Ericsson evolved packet gateway. http://goo.gl/tEjcWP • Use of proprietary black boxes [3] • Use of inflexible hard-state signalling protocols [49] • Use of monolithic functionalities [3] • Reconfiguration/updates available only with heavy integration within network operators [50] • Updates require replacements of existing equipment even if it is still sufficient for most purposes [50] • High CAPEX to extend the network (i.e., increasing coverage) [50], [59], [60], [61] • High CAPEX to introduce novel services [50], [59], [60], [61] • High OPEX for network management [50], [59], [60], [61] Complexity • Network entities involved in both U/C-planes [51], [52] • Use of GTP tunnels [54], [17] • Offering a converged service view [4] • Centralized U-plane (issues at the SGW and PGW) [53], [49] • Centralized C-plane (issues at the MME) [55] • High number of information related to UEs (charging, QoS, etc.) [47] • Delay susceptible of the overload at the MME, SGW and PGW [53], [49], [55] • Reduction of the overall capacity (in terms of resources to be used for data traffic) of the network [62] • High CAPEX/OPEX to scale the network [17] Centralised U/C-planes • U-plane unaware of session profiles and characteristics [47] • C-plane signalling is growing 50% faster than data traffic [55] • U-plane connectivity may involve a waste of network resources even if UEs do not have data to send [62] • Reduction of the overall capacity (in terms of resources to be used for data traffic) of the network...…”

Integrated NFV/SDN Architectures: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Several research papers focus on providing Network Slicing [73,75,80,87,88] for the new generation of mobile network. The 3GPP has identi ed Network Slicing as one of the key technologies to achieve the goals in 5G Networks [80] since it is a potential solution to enable suitable exibility to address the speci c requirements of di erent use cases.…”