Design and Implementation of a Testbed for Network Slicing

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu | Master's thesis

Date

2018-02-12

Department

Major/Subject

Networking Technology

Mcode

S3029

Degree programme

CCIS - Master’s Programme in Computer, Communication and Information Sciences (TS2013)

Language

en

Pages

54 + 9

Series

Abstract

Next generation 5G networks are envisioned to enable a fully mobile and connected society. They are envisioned to provide support for very diverse and challenging communication and business use cases having disparate service level requirements. 5G is expected to shape a truly Networked Society. To effectuate such a Networked Society, where the network supports services and applications with disparate and conflicting service level requirements, a fundamental rethinking of the network architecture is required that will support extreme requirements for coverage, capacity, throughput, latency, and availability. The network model should shift from current "network for connectivity" model to "network for services" model. The one-size-fits-all approach adopted in current networks will not be able to handle the flexibility required for future networks. That is where Network Slicing comes in. Network Slicing is a technology which will offer an effective way for the operators to segment a single network according to particular service requirements and deploy logical network for each service type over a common physical infrastructure. This thesis work develops a testbed that demonstrates the implementation of dynamic network slicing and the benefits provided by it using a use case scenario. Open source tools are used for compute and network function virtualization. The testbed is ETSI NFV compliant and delivers a fully automated dynamic network slicing solution. The testbed is built using OpenStack as cloud platform and Open Baton provides the ETSI NFV MANO functionality. The testbed uses TOSCA to define network service model. Slice orchestrator, an application server, provides the multi domain slice orchestration functionality. Slice selector, an SDN controller and a database, provides the networking and registry services for different network slices and devices. Functional and performance evaluation of the testbed is carried out to confirm that it fulfills the design requirements.

Description

Supervisor

Kantola, Raimo

Thesis advisor

Beijar, Nicklas

Keywords

network slicing, 5G, MANO, virtualization, orchestration, NFV

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