5G testbed platform

• Main Author: Sousa, Eduardo Santos
• Publication Date: 2019
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/29444
• topic: 5G; SDN; NFV; MANO; OSM; virtualization; Testbed platform; 5GinFIRE

Telecommunication networks are evolving their networks to support 5G verticals and all that it entails for the core aspects of the infrastructure. These networks are moving from the use of single purpose appliances to virtualization and the usage of commercial off the shelf hardware, allowing for cost reduction while supporting a myriad of use cases without a major change to the infrastructure. This work aims to determine if the proposed architecture by the 5GinFIRE project can be used for a 5G testbed and using open source software to make all possible, reusing lessons learned from those projects and enabling them to support more use cases. It builds on all the work made on those open source projects such as Openstack and Open Source MANO and apply them to create a 5G testbed that can be used both locally and a distributed way. This testbed should be able to support network function virtualization workloads either deployed by a local orchestrator or be part of a multi-site setup, where a central orchestrator controls multiple sites and partitions that workload into as many sites as necessary. Based on a review of the literature available for 5G networks, NFV, SDN, MANO and an analysis of the proposed architecture of the 5GinFIRE project, this thesis demonstrates how to build a 5G testbed using open source projects and how to test it, to validate that it is working properly. It also presents how the testbed was interconnected with other testbeds to create a multi-site environment. The validation part has a big emphasis in this work, where multiple functional tests were ran to see if it worked both locally and in a multi-site setup. It was also created a complex workload to determine that a multi-site scenario was achievable and to determine what were the pitfalls of the orchestrator. The results indicate that it is possible to create the 5G testbed, that can be used in various configurations and that a generic orchestrator can be used to deploy workloads both locally and from a central location to many points of presence. There were several additions contributed to the Open Source MANO project and the creation of a complex workload was beneficial for the whole community, to demonstrate that it is possible to create workloads that span multiple sites and can be deployed from a central location. Further work is needed to keep improving Open Source MANO and other technologies, to mature them and drive them for a wider adoption.