Scaling Network Slices with a 5G Testbed: A Resource Consumption Study

The next generation of networks will be utilized by multiple industry verticals with different service requirements on top of a common infrastructure. Through network function virtualization (NFV), the 5G core and Radio Access Network (RAN) functions are now implemented as virtual network functions (VNFs) on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware. The use of virtualized micro-services to implement these 5G VNFs enables end-to-end logically isolated network slices on a large scale. In this paper, we seek to measure, analyze, and understand the limits of 5G micro-service virtualization when using lightweight containers to realize different network slicing models with different service guarantees. Our deployment consists of the OpenAirInterface (OAI) core and a simulated RAN in a containerized setting to create a universally deployable testbed. We perform stress tests on individual VNFs and create network slicing models applicable to real-life scenarios. Our analysis captures the increase in compute resource consumption of individual 5G VNFs during various core network procedures. Furthermore, using different network slicing models, we are able to see the progressive increase in resource consumption as the service guarantees of the slices become more demanding. The framework created using this testbed is the first to provide such analytics on lightweight virtualized 5G core VNFs with large scale end-to-end connections.