NFVMon: Enabling Multioperator Flow Monitoring in 5G Mobile Edge Computing

Abstract

With the advances of new-generation wireless and mobile communication systems such as the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks and Internet of Things (IoT) networks, demanding applications such as Ultra-High-Definition video applications is becoming ever popular. These applications require real-time monitoring and processing to meet the mission-critical quality of service requirements and are expected to be supported by the emerging fog or edge computing paradigms. This paper presents NFVMon, a novel monitoring architecture to enable flow monitoring capabilities of network traffic in a 5G multioperator mobile edge computing environment. The proposed NFVMon is integrated with the management plane of the Cloud Computing. NFVMon has been prototyped and a reference implementation is presented. It provides novel capabilities to provide disaggregated metrics related to the different 5G mobile operators sharing infrastructures and also about the different 5G subscribers of each of such mobile operators. Extensive experiments for evaluating the performance of the system have been conducted on a mid-sized infrastructure testbed.