A Virtual Network PaaS for 3GPP 4G and Beyond Core Network Services

摘要

Cloud computing and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are emerging as keytechnologies to overcome the challenges facing 4G and beyond mobile systems.Over the last few years, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has gained momentum andhas become more widely adopted throughout IT enterprises. It simplifies theapplications provisioning and accelerates time-to-market while lowering costs.Telco can leverage the same model to provision the 4G and beyond core networkservices using NFV technology. However, many challenges have to be addressed,mainly due to the specificities of network services. This paper proposes anarchitecture for a Virtual Network Platform-as-a-Service (VNPaaS) to provision3GPP 4G and beyond core network services in a distributed environment. As anillustrative use case, the proposed architecture is employed to provision the3GPP Home Subscriber Server (HSS) as-a-Service (HSSaaS). The HSSaaS is builtfrom Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) resulting from a novel decompositionof HSS. A prototype is implemented and early measurements are made.