Monitoring Platform Evolution towards Serverless Computing for 5G and Beyond Systems Articles uri icon

publication date

  • June 2022

start page

  • 1489

end page

  • 1504

issue

  • 2

volume

  • 19

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 1932-4537

abstract

  • Fifth generation (5G) and beyond systems require flexible and efficient monitoring platforms to guarantee optimal key performance indicators (KPIs) in various scenarios. Their applicability
    in Edge computing environments requires lightweight monitoring solutions. This work evaluates different candidate technologies to implement a monitoring platform for 5G and
    beyond systems in these environments. For monitoring data plane technologies, we evaluate different virtualization technologies,
    including bare metal servers, virtual machines, and orchestrated
    containers. We show that containers not only offer superior
    flexibility and deployment agility, but also allow obtaining better
    throughput and latency. In addition, we explore the suitability
    of the Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) serverless paradigm for
    deploying the functions used to manage the monitoring platform.
    This is motivated by the event oriented nature of those functions,
    designed to set up the monitoring infrastructure for newly
    created services. When the FaaS warm start mode is used,
    the platform gives users the perception of resources that are
    always available. When a cold start mode is used, containers
    running the application"s modules are automatically destroyed
    when the application is not in use. Our analysis compares both
    of them with the standard deployment of microservices. The
    experimental results show that the cold start mode produces
    a significant latency increase, along with potential instabilities.
    For this reason, its usage is not recommended despite the
    potential savings of computing resources. Conversely, when the
    warm start mode is used for executing configuration tasks
    of monitoring infrastructure, it can provide similar execution
    times to a microservice-based deployment. In addition, the FaaS
    approach significantly simplifies the code logic in comparison
    with microservices, reducing lines of code to less than 38%, thus
    reducing development time. Thus, FaaS in warm start mode
    represents the best candidate technology to implements such
    management functions.

keywords

  • 5g networks; monitoring and data collection; serverless computing; faas; performance comparison