SDN/NFV-based M-CORD for Achieving Scalability in Deploying NB-IoT Gateways

摘要

The deployment of IoT (Internet of Things) gateways opens new challenges for 5G networks to meet the rapid increase in IoT devices, services, and protocols at a high scalability level. To deal with those challenges, recently, NB- Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) gateway and M-CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter for mobile networks) have been considered as key technologies for developing 5G architectures. In this study, we first propose a comprehensive architecture integrated NB-IoT gateways and M-CORD to meet diversified requirements of 5G and IoT services. Next, Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are applied to build various virtual network functions (VNFs) on M-CORD Mobile Edges. And then, based on these functions, we perform offloading functions of an NB-IoT gateway to an M-CORD Mobile Edge. After that, a network QoS control application is deployed to perform on demand QoS control for multi-tenancy IoT services with different requirements. Finally, several experiments are implemented on a real NB-IoT gateway and our testbed environment, and the results are also presented.