Abstract
The proliferation of mobiles devices, application sprawl, and the ever-increasing data volume generates significant stress on cellular networks and particularly on the cellular core, also known as the Evolved Packet Core (EPC), i.e., the cellular network component residing between the radio access network and the Internet. This is further exacerbated by the deployment of hardware appliances for the implementation of a wide range of network functions (e.g., gateways, mobility management, firewalls, network address translation), hindering any opportunity for elastic provisioning, and eventually leading to high operational costs and a significant degree of load imbalance across the EPC.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been seen a promising solution in order to enable elasticity in the cellular core. Applying NFV to the EPC raises the need for network function (NF) placement, which in turn entails significant challenges, due to the stringent delay budgets among cellular core components and the coexistence of communicating data and control plane elements. To address these challenges, we present a linear programming (LP) formulation for the computation of NF placements that strikes a balance between optimality and time complexity. Our evaluation results show that the LP achieves significantly better load balancing, request acceptance rate, and resource utilization compared to a greedy algorithm that performs NF placement inline with carriers’ common practice today.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
The relative sever utilization is deducted from their residual capacities in the term \(1-\frac{r_u}{r_{u,max}}\). The same applies to the link utilization.
- 2.
We set \(\upvarepsilon =10^{-10}\) in our simulations.
- 3.
The tests were conducted on a 2 GHz AMD Opteron server (restricted to single core).
- 4.
See Sect. 5.1 for the definition of the load balancing level.
References
ETSI Network Function Virtualization. http://www.etsi.org/technologies-clusters/technologies/nfv
OPNFV. https://www.opnfv.org/
T-NOVA Project. http://www.t-nova.eu/
SONATA Project. http://www.sonata-nfv.eu/
UNIFY Project. http://www.fp7-unify.eu/
3GPP TS 24.301: 3GPP Non-Access-Stratum (NAS) protocol for Evolved Packet System (EPS). http://www.3gpp.org/DynaReport/24301.htm
Business Case for Juniper Networks Virtualized Mobile Control Gateway, White Paper, Juniper (2013)
Abujoda, A., Kouchaksaraei, H.R., Papadimitriou, P.: SDN-based source routing for scalable service chaining in datacenters. In: Mamatas, L., Matta, I., Papadimitriou, P., Koucheryavy, Y. (eds.) WWIC 2016. LNCS, vol. 9674, pp. 66–77. Springer, Cham (2016). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-33936-8_6
Abujoda, A., Papadimitriou, P.: MIDAS: middlebox discovery and selection for on-path flow processing. In: IEEE COMSNETS, Bangalore, India, January 2015
Bagaa, M., Taleb, T., Ksentini, A.: Service-aware network function placement for efficient traffic handling in carrier cloud. In: IEEE WCNC, Istanbul, Turkey, April 2014
Banerjee, A., et al.: Scaling the LTE control-plane for future mobile access. In: ACM CONEXT, Heidelberg, Germany, December 2015
Baumgartner, A., Reddy, V.S., Bauschert, T.: Mobile core network virtualization: a model for combined virtual core network function placement and topology optimization. In: IEEE NetSoft 2015, London, UK, April 2015
Baumgartner, A., Reddy, V.S., Bauschert, T.: Combined virtual mobile core network function placement and topology optimization with latency bounds. In: EWSDN 2015, Bilbao, Spain, September 2015
Basta, A., et al.: Applying NFV and SDN to LTE mobile core gateways, the functions placement problem. In: 4th Workshop on All Things Cellular, ACM SIGCOMM 2014, Chicago, US, August 2014
Cao, Z., Abujoda, A., Papadimitriou, P.: Distributed data deluge (D3): efficient state management for virtualized network functions. In: IEEE INFOCOM SWFAN, San Francisco, USA, April 2016
Cohen, R., Lewin-Eytan, L., Naor, J., Raz, D.: Near optimal placement of virtual network functions. In: IEEE INFOCOM, Hong Kong, China, April 2015
Diego, W., Hamchaoui, I., Lagrange, X.: The cost of QoS in LTE/EPC mobile networks evaluation of processing load. In: IEEE VTC, Boston, MA, USA (2015)
Diego, W., Hamchaoui, I., Lagrange, X.: Cost factor analysis of QoS in LTE/EPC mobile networks. In: IEEE CCNC, Las Vegas, USA, January 2016
Dietrich, D., Abujoda, A., Papadimitriou, P.: Network service embedding across multiple providers with nestor. In: IFIP Networking, Toulouse, France, May 2015
Dietrich, D., Papagianni, C., Papadimitriou, P., Baras, J.: Network function placement on virtualized cellular cores. In: IEEE COMSNETS, Bangalore, India, January 2017
Bari, M.F.: Data center network virtualization: a survey. IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutorials 15(2), 909–928 (2013)
Fayazbakhsh, S., et al.: Enforcing network-wide policies in the presence of dynamic middlebox actions using flowtags. In: USENIX NSDI 2014, Seattle, USA, April 2014
Gember-Jacobson, A., et al.: OpenNF: enabling innovation in network function control. In: ACM SIGCOMM 2014, Chicago, USA, August 2014
Hirschman, B., et al.: High-performance evolved packet core signaling and bearer processing on general-purpose processors. IEEE Netw. 29(3), 6–14 (2015)
Lukovszki, T., Schmid, S.: Online admission control and embedding of service chains. In: Scheideler, C. (ed.) Structural Information and Communication Complexity. LNCS, vol. 9439, pp. 104–118. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25258-2_8
Mehraghdam, S., Keller, M., Karl, H.: Specifying and placing chains of virtual network functions. In: IEEE CloudNet, Luxembourg, October 2014
Prados-Garzon, J., et al.: Latency evaluation of a virtualized MME. In: IEEE Wireless Days, Toulouse, France, March 2016
Qazi, Z., et al.: KLEIN: a minimally disruptive design for an elastic cellular core. In: ACM SOSR 2016, Santa Clara, USA, March 2016
Qazi, Z., et al.: SIMPLE-fying middlebox policy enforcement using SDN. In: ACM SIGCOMM 2013, Hong Kong, China, August 2013
Rajan, A.S., et al.: Understanding the bottlenecks in virtualizing cellular core network functions. In: IEEE LANMAN, Beijing, China, April 2015
Sama, M.R., Ben Hadj Said, S., Guillouard, K., Suciu, L.: Enabling network programmability in LTE/EPC architecture using OpenFlow. In: WiOpt 2014, Hammamet, Tunisia, May 2014
Savic, Z.: LTE Design and Deployment Strategies - CISCO. http://tinyurl.com/lj2erpg
Shafiq, M.Z., Ji, L., Liu, A.X., Pang, J., Wang, J.: A first look at cellular machine-to-machine traffic: large scale measurement and characterization. In: ACM SIGMETRICS, London, UK, June 2012
Taleb, T., Bagaa, M., Ksentini, A.: User mobility-aware virtual network function placement for virtual 5G network infrastructure. In: IEEE ICC 2025, London, UK, June 2015
Taleb, T., Ksentini, A.: Gateway relocation avoidance-aware network function placement in carrier cloud. In: ACM MSWiM, Barcelona, Spain, November 2013
Wang, Z., et al.: An untold story of middleboxes in cellular networks. In: ACM SIGCOMM 2011, Toronto, Canada, August 2011
Yousaf, F., et al.: SoftEPC: dynamic instantiation of mobile core network entities for efficient resource utilization. In: IEEE ICC, Budapest, Hungary, June 2013
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the EU FP7 T-NOVA Project (619520).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dietrich, D., Papagianni, C., Papadimitriou, P., Baras, J.S. (2017). Near-Optimal Placement of Virtualized EPC Functions with Latency Bounds. In: Sastry, N., Chakraborty, S. (eds) Communication Systems and Networks. COMSNETS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10340. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67235-9_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67235-9_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67234-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67235-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)