A containerized monitoring toolkit to measure performance in 5G/NFV networks

• Main Author: Σαμαράς, Κωνσταντίνος
• Other Authors: Samaras, Konstantinos
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Containers; 5G; Cloud; Monitoring; Kubernetes; Docker; Υπολογιστικό νέφος; Απόδοση δικτύου

Nowadays network connectivity touches almost every aspect of our daily lives which means the use of mobile data keeps growing thus creating the need for a more sophisticated mobile technology, 5G. The next generation of wireless technology, 5G is based on a cloud-native core (5GC), can utilize virtualization technologies and follow a Service-based architecture thus taking advantage of all their benefits. However, even on 5G networks, in order to fulfill the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, it is crucial for network providers to monitor various points in the network and detect any faults. Testing network performance and collecting metrics helps a service provider to define network resource utilization, predict future traffic demands, identify abnormal traffic patterns, and offer suggestions for enhancing network performance. Network administrators traditionally use monitoring tools to measure and analyze the network, for instance a tool that uses client-server approach. Moreover, one of 5G’s key technology is virtualization and while hypervisor-based virtualization is the prevailing technology, the environment is altering recently, as a new form of virtualization that has existed for a long-time gains popularity, called containerization. Since enterprises grow more and more their adoption of Cloud Computing solutions, they also move towards containerized technologies and microservices concepts because of the wide range of benefits they offer, as better uptime, faster deployments, better hardware utilization and lower costs are only a few of them. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the basic concepts of these technologies, then create a containerized and orchestrated toolkit, with which we could monitor and make measurements throughout a 5G container-centric Cloud infrastructure to test the network performance and collect metrics. To achieve that, Docker and Kubernetes as the container technologies are used, along with a set of free open-source monitoring tools like Iperf3 and Ookla Speedtest, resulting in a lightweight and easily configurable implementation.