Assessment of an open-source mobile network framework for implementing Network Slicing

With the evolution of wireless communication system, especially the increasing demanding of services and applications, fitting different scenarios with the same physical network infrastructure became infeasible and inefficient. Furthermore, the typical usage scenarios, such as eMBB, URLLC and mMTC, require more and more divergent needs in terms of bandwidth, latency and reliability. Hence, to fulfil the market requests, network programmability and virtualization becomes fundamental. A key enabler for networks customization is Network Slicing, that allows to overlay the physical infrastructure with multiple virtual networks sharing resources efficiently. A cost-efficient way of testing new solutions is by deploying open-source testbeds with functionalities close to real networks. Therefore, numerous proposals have been pushed from industry and academia world, providing flexible and programmable open-source testbed supporting Network Slicing. Although many of them are not easy to deploy and use. Aiming to find the most suitable testing environment for the analysis, the initial part of the thesis deals with a survey of the principal state-of-the-art open-source framework which enable end-to-end NS. However, among the several solutions, Mosaic5G ecosystem appears to be the most attractive in terms of openess, flexibility, stage of completion and easy interaction. Therefore, the thesis investigates the capabilities of Mosaic5G framework, especially for resource management purposes. Once deployed the testbed, it has been analysed the behaviour of the RAN segment in presence of slice orchestration. Thanks to the RAN controller, network slices can be instantiated and their life cycle managed according to dynamic consumer needs. Further, network performances have been evaluated in presence of plenty Users Equipment, different scheduling algorithms and variable channel state conditions when two distinct categories of users access the channel simultaneously. In particular, it has been considered a typical scenario including eMBB and URLLC services, where the firsts are characterized by high-throughput downloading applications and the latter by priority low-latency and high-reliability traffic for missions critical purposes. By means of numerous experiments carried out in different conditions, it has been verified the benefits of exploiting tailored slices to satisfy QoS requirements, especially reducing latency for URLLC users. Finally, some policies have been deployed to help the automation of slice management process, aiming to sharing efficiently the resources. This work aims to highlight the importance of open source NS platforms for prototype a 4G/5G networks: providing low-cost and easily accessible testbeds, allows to speed up the innovation, especially in this context where customization on service needs becomes commonplace.