Seraoui Youssef, Raouyane Brahim, Belmekki Mostafa, Bellafkih Mostafa
RAISS Laboratory, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, National Institute of Posts and Telecommunications (INPT), Rabat, Morocco.
IT&NT Laboratory, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Faculty of Science of Ain Chock, University of Hassan II, Casablanca, Morocco.
Heliyon. 2020 Jun 29;6(6):e04307. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04307. eCollection 2020 Jun.
Mobile network operators (MNOs) continually look to improve their business and become more agile and competitive within the quickly developing telecommunications industry. In turn, telecommunication professionals put forward and adapt advanced models and frameworks to assist MNOs to achieve their goals. In this context, the Business Process Framework (eTOM) was established by the TeleManagement Forum and on which we base this work to suggest a mapping of this eTOM business process model upon the network functions virtualization (NFV) framework. Thereby, the main purpose is to design a hybrid architecture by the combination of the aforementioned frameworks for dynamic service delivery with improved resource performance and quality of service so as to fulfill some of the purposes of the 5 generation (5G) technology with regard to a telecommunication system managed and orchestrated in a virtualized environment. Indeed, MNOs will be in a position to scale mobile services up and down fast and reduce costs to better align them with network usage. These procedures are performed based on flexible service chaining through implemented NFV management and orchestration modules along with SDN controller functions. In this article, we outline possible designs and analyses of flexible mobile service chaining to support end-to-end network slicing for dynamic service provisioning in order to provide a novel approach in the framework of the 5G technology, more especially from data and signaling based network perspectives. We project our proposal onto the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) core network to discuss both dynamic and static signaling service provisioning approaches. In this situation, we set up a testbed platform with the goal of assessing the behavior of a virtualized IMS system, in a static signaling service provisioning environment through two signaling service chains to validate part of our proposed approaches. Experiment results confirm that virtualized IMS signaling resource performance indicators could be enhanced in the case of unpredicted performance degradation of one of the virtualized signaling resources assigned to the IMS virtual network functions composing the main signaling service chain by instantiating a second signaling service chain. Finally, IMS application performance indicators are improved regarding registration delay and session setup time.
移动网络运营商（MNO）不断寻求改善其业务，并在快速发展的电信行业中变得更加敏捷和具有竞争力。相应地，电信专业人员提出并采用先进的模型和框架，以协助MNO实现其目标。在此背景下，电信管理论坛建立了业务流程框架（eTOM），我们基于此开展工作，建议将此eTOM业务流程模型映射到网络功能虚拟化（NFV）框架上。从而，主要目的是通过结合上述框架来设计一种混合架构，以实现动态服务交付，提高资源性能和服务质量，从而在虚拟化环境中管理和编排的电信系统方面实现第五代（5G）技术的部分目标。实际上，MNO将能够快速扩大和缩小移动服务规模，并降低成本，使其更好地与网络使用情况相匹配。这些过程是通过实施NFV管理和编排模块以及软件定义网络（SDN）控制器功能，基于灵活的服务链来执行的。在本文中，我们概述了灵活移动服务链的可能设计和分析，以支持用于动态服务供应的端到端网络切片，从而在5G技术框架中提供一种新颖的方法，特别是从基于数据和信令的网络角度。我们将我们的提议应用于IP多媒体子系统（IMS）核心网络，以讨论动态和静态信令服务供应方法。在这种情况下，我们建立了一个测试平台，目的是通过两条信令服务链，在静态信令服务供应环境中评估虚拟化IMS系统的行为，以验证我们提出的部分方法。实验结果证实，在分配给构成主信令服务链的IMS虚拟网络功能的其中一个虚拟化信令资源出现意外性能下降的情况下，通过实例化第二条信令服务链，可以提高虚拟化IMS信令资源性能指标。最后，IMS应用性能指标在注册延迟和会话建立时间方面得到了改善。
