Large-scale real-time 5gmulti-tenant network topology discovery and holographic monitoring
Creators: name: Navarro, Ignacio Sánchez
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: The new generation of mobile networks including Fifth-Generation (5G) and beyond areempowered by virtualisation and softwarisation to reduce both capital and operating expenditures, whilst benefiting from network programmability and flexibility for various usecases. Meanwhile, virtualisation and softwarisation introduce unprecedented complexitiesto network infrastructure topologies, and thus impose substantial challenges to networktopology management.This research investigates innovative approaches to help reduce the new operational coststhat arise with the complexity associated to the introduction of these complex topologies. Inaddition, it investigates more efficient ways to understand the network, providing a spatiallayout of the multi-tenant 5G network topologies. To achieve a complete management inreal time for both, virtual and physical networks, this research explores ways to improve thebehaviour of the different components of the infrastructure by utilising spatial metrics.The primary innovation beyond the state of the art technology is the novel architecture tosupport the discovery and rendering of software data paths, containers and virtual machines,with support for geographically distributed edges. This architecture is composed of a seriesof components capable of discovering information in real-time about the network topology,and using it to carry out monitoring and management tasks. Among them, Layout MonitoringAgent (LMA), Topology Monitoring Agent (TMA) and Topology Graphical User Interface(GUI) are the direct results of this research work. LMA provides layout structures on thegraph that forms the network topology, so that the topology GUI can place each elementof the network in a logically ordered way. Topology GUI is the rendering application thatallows network topology monitoring in real time. It is implemented for both Windows-based computers and holographic headsets (HoloLens 1st Gen and HoloLens 2nd Gen). TMAprovides spatial metrics to take allocation decisions on where to place new componentsthrough the virtual and physical networks. This calculation of such metrics is so complex thatuntil now, it has been completely impractical to calculate them in acceptable time frames;however, a significant improvement in such calculations has been achieved to make themusable for multi-tenant 5G topologies. All these components have achieved another importantinnovation, which is the flexibility to support the differentiation of business roles by meansof a novel method to perform an alignment of data models, associated with each of theinfrastructures, and owned by each of them of such different roles.LMA, TMA and topology GUI have been designed, implemented and empirically validated, and experiment results have demonstrated promising scalability. LMA is able togenerate a topology layout structure for a network with 37,000 devices in less than sixminutes, and subsequently to perform updates in real-time. Topology GUI is able to renderthe same topology in approximately 100 minutes, and also allows real-time navigation andupdates after the initial rendering. Finally, TMA is able to calculate the metrics for a network topology with more than one million devices in approximately two minutes, and suchperformance would be otherwise completely impracticable (in hundreds of years) withoutTMA.