On Service Resilience in Cloud-Native 5G Mobile Systems

To cope with the tremendous growth in mobile data traffic on one hand, and the modest average revenue per user on the other hand, mobile operators have been exploring network virtualization and cloud computing technologies to build cost-efficient and elastic mobile networks and to have them offered as a cloud service. In such cloud-based mobile networks, ensuring service resilience is an important challenge to tackle. Indeed, high availability and service reliability are important requirements of carrier grade, but not necessarily intrinsic features of cloud computing. Building a system that requires the five nines reliability on a platform that may not always grant it is, therefore, a hurdle. Effectively, in carrier cloud, service resilience can be heavily impacted by a failure of any network function (NF) running on a virtual machine (VM). In this paper, we introduce a framework, along with efficient and proactive restoration mechanisms, to ensure service resilience in carrier cloud. As restoration of a NF failure impacts a potential number of users, adequate network overload control mechanisms are also proposed. A mathematical model is developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. The obtained results are encouraging and demonstrate that the proposed mechanisms efficiently achieve their design goals.