Architecture and design considerations for next-generation mobile networks with integrated edge computing
Creators: name: Choudhury, Shalini
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2024

description: The 5G and beyond network aims to deliver higher bandwidth, lower latency and support high device density for ensuring efficient performance of next-generation services. Meeting these demands requires significant performance improvements in mobile/wireless network efficiency, performance, and functionality. In this thesis, we propose and validate networkarchitectures to overcome the limitations of the standards based network. Integrating mobile edge cloud platforms with the network supports time-critical applications such as augmented reality and autonomous vehicles by localizing compute, storage, and networking resources, thereby reducing propagation delay. The first part of the thesis presents rearchitecting the mobile core network making it flat and distributed, without the use of vendor-specific gateways. The distributed flat core network design uses the concept of identifiers to achieve optimal routing without data packets traveling through tunnels and gateways, enabling seamless mobility and scalability. Next, a popular 5G mobile core technology, the cloud-native architecture, is analyzed to meet the diverse service requirements. The cloud-native core presents a microservice architecture for network function virtualization. It is assisted by a logically centralized orchestrator hosted in the mobile edge cloud (MEC) that proactively manages and orchestrates resources for removing control and data plane bottlenecks. The MEC orchestrator enables maximizing resource utilization and consequently helps to achieve diverse quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of NextG services. Chapter 3 addresses technical limitations associated with the dynamic mobility of end users. Clusters of users hosting their respective services in mobile edge cloud (MEC) platforms may migrate from one access network to another. MEC faces resource assignment and load balancing challenges to support user mobility because the edge cloud is intrinsically local with limited compute capability. Therefore, a compute and network-aware lightweight resource-sharing framework with dynamic container migration, ShareOn, is proposed. The migration framework is validated using mobility data trace of San Fransisco city. The end-to-end system is implemented using a container hypervisor called LXD (Linux Container Hypervisor), executing a real-time application for detecting license plates in automobiles. A thorough migration cost analysis improves the system response time by 22% even when the edge cloud nodes are 3.5x loaded. Chapter 4 explores the implications of using latency-sensitive applications from remote sites, as investigated through international experiments on the COSMIC platform. It was observed when applications are remotely accessed over a high-bandwidth-delay product (BDP) link, TCP over wide-area links can result in performance bottleneck, making it more difficult to meet service requirements. The service migration approach to a local edge cloud platform, closer to the target user, enhances the responsiveness of the application by 70%. In the concluding part of the thesis, we investigate network latency in edge-based remote rendering over mobile networks and identify the bottleneck limiting the performance of latency-sensitive applications such as virtual reality (VR) gaming. We describe a proof-of-concept prototype framework developed to support and facilitate experimentation to study the components of network latency and identify the network parameters degrading VR application performance. Additionally, we enhance the quality-of-experience (QoE) for VR applications by prioritizing a traffic sub-flow; this is achieved by ensuring reliable delivery of VR tracking messages over a low-latency slice using TCP in the uplink, whileaudio and video frames are streamed over UDP in the downlink.