Lightweight container-based OpenEPC deployment and its evaluation

The Network Function Virtualization (NFV) paradigm has become mature enough for network operators to start migrating their core architectures to it. NFV presents numerous advantages over the traditional hardware-centric approach in terms of cost, versatility, time-to-market and ease of deployment. Another technology that is experiencing rapid adoption is virtualization using containers. This technology allows the implementation of a virtualized environment which is very close to that obtained from a virtual machine (VM) hypervisor but without the overhead of running multiple operating systems (OSs) on a single machine, resulting in a significant performance boost. Given this background it is natural to seek solutions combining these two approaches. In our case we are interested in deploying OpenEPC, an EPC implementation developed by Core Network Dynamics, using containers. This is, as far as we know, the first container-based deployment of a virtualized LTE core network. In this paper we give a step-by-step description of the process we followed, perform some tests of the resulting platform and analyse its performance.