Slicing 5G Core Network based on the Ryu SDN Controller for Everything as a Service

SDN has brought a high level of programmability in networking technologies and plays a vital role for the development of 5G and beyond 5G systems. As a major novel concept associated with SDN, network slicing enables the creation of virtual networks with distinct control and management functions based on common infrastructure, each meeting specific requirements that are dedicated to various categories of applications. So far, the realization of network slicing based on complex frameworks like management and orchestration has been a popular approach. In this paper, we investigate a lightweight alternative method for implementing network slicing that allocates logical parts of multiple physical resources with certain QoS properties without the need for hypervisor software. The approach herein is to create slices at the SDN forwarding equipment level and a single SDN controller can configure a shared physical network infrastructure into a number of network slices. Using this method, each slice may have different properties depending on the tenant requirements. In particular, a resource reservation framework and special Linux kernel tools are used for resource reservation and allocation. This solution offers several benefits for tenants and service providers thanks to the involvement of already available kernel mechanisms for resource allocation. In our implementation, several tools such as Iperf for traffic generation, Linux Cgroup and linear rate control, Ryu controller, and Mininet are included. Through experiments performed based on our implementation, we demonstrate that performance isolation has been achieved successfully for each slice.