Experimental Evaluation of the Effectiveness of Virtualized Mobile Core Networks in the Real Commercial Network Environment

In the mobile communication, over the long term, traffic growth is driven by both the rising number of smartphone subscriptions and an increasing average data volume per subscription, fueled primarily by increasing view of the video content. The Evolve Packet Core (EPC) itself is a very complicated network and therefore its hardware and software systems bear a huge cost for the mobile network operators. The solution to this huge cost problem is network virtualization and softwarization. However, virtualization and softwarization come with the cost of performance decrease and, to a network operator, guaranteeing the network performance at the carrier-grade level is a very crucial task. In the past, most of the works have tried to verify those performance metrics on the laboratory and test-bed environment only and it may not works on real network environment. That said, on this paper, we would present our evaluation results of virtualized EPC components in real (commercial) network environment and compare it with those of the physical version. The results show that the virtual version can meet the carrier-grade quality and performance requirements of communication network providers.