Abstract

5G network evolution results in new challenges for mobile network management and orchestration. The emerging SDN and NFV technologies are transforming the network infrastructure and network service components into compositions of programmable virtualized functions. The resulting flexibility allows the network to be conceived as services, which are aware of vertical application QoS/QoE requirements. While most recent works focus on flexible network control and improved resource utilization in emerging mobile network architectures, an end-to-end orchestration of both network infrastructure and vertical application is not adequately explored. In this work, we identify the challenges and propose a service oriented framework for application-aware end-to-end mobile network orchestration. We also present a prototypical realization of the proposed framework, which is an orchestration platform for virtualized mobile networks. To address the challenges of multi-stakeholder and multi-layer mobile network architecture, we employ event calculus for modeling the network layers, and abductive reasoning approach for autonomous policy translation and service provisioning in a 2-phase algorithm. The framework is validated with a 5G enhanced mobility management application as a service on our software defined mobile network testbed. Initial performance measurements are analyzed for practical insights into the proposed framework, as well as suggestions for its future development.