Fifth generation (5G) and beyond systems require flexible and efficient monitoring platforms to guarantee optimal key performance indicators (KPIs) in various scenarios. Their applicability in Edge computing environments requires lightweight monitoring solutions. This work evaluates different candidate technologies to implement a monitoring platform for 5G and beyond systems in these environments. For monitoring data plane technologies, we evaluate different virtualization technologies, including bare metal servers, virtual machines, and orchestrated containers. We show that containers not only offer superior flexibility and deployment agility, but also allow obtaining better throughput and latency. In addition, we explore the suitability of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless paradigm for deploying the functions used to manage the monitoring platform. This is motivated by the event oriented nature of those functions, designed to set up the monitoring infrastructure for newly created services. When the FaaS warm start mode is used, the platform gives users the perception of resources that are always available. When a cold start mode is used, containers running the application’s modules are automatically destroyed when the application is not in use. Our analysis compares both of them with the standard deployment of microservices. The experimental results show that the cold start mode produces a significant latency increase, along with potential instabilities. For this reason, its usage is not recommended despite the potential savings of computing resources. Conversely, when the warm start mode is used for executing configuration tasks of monitoring infrastructure, it can provide similar execution times to a microservice-based deployment. In addition, the FaaS approach significantly simplifies the code logic in comparison with microservices, reducing lines of code to less than 38%, thus reducing development time. Thus, FaaS in warm start mode represents the best candidate technology to implements such management functions.

Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for vertical industries to introduce new services. However, one widely-recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. In this work, we showcase the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, via extending the 5Growth baseline architecture and designing a new data-plane pipeline, i.e., virtual queue, over the P4 switch. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is presented serving different service requests over a mixed data path, including P4 switches and Open vSwitches (OvSs).

The introduction of the Software-Defined Networking paradigm for the operation, administration and management of WAN environments, known as SD-WAN, is becoming increasingly popular due to the clear advantages that this technology provides, such as the reduction of CAPEX and OPEX related to the networking infrastructure or the flexibility provided by the development and deployment of network applications regardless of the underlying infrastructure. However, there is still a lack of solutions for enterprise networks, without carrying a substantial increase in cost, adapted to their daily reality, in which the WAN can be split in several domains, each of them possibly managed by different operators and based on different technologies and protocols. As a result, today it is not possible to have a complete solution for SD-WAN that covers all domains, reducing its scope to a single set of domains which may interact with other external domains. To address this issue, this paper presents Alviu, a SD-WAN network orchestrator based on open-source technologies that assures end-to-end network slicing to managed enterprise and academic networks thanks to a dynamic intentbased configuration of the different elements of the managed network. In addition to positioning Alviu in the current state of the art and detailing its architecture, we also evaluate Alviu’s operation in a testbed that emulates the interconnection between a set of SD-WAN domains with are also connected to other external domains based on legacy routing protocols, assessing the deployment time depending on the domains present in the complete network.