Automation of Virtualized 5G Infrastructure Using Mosaic 5G Operator over Kubernetes Supporting Network Slicing

Abstract

The rising of diverse requirements and the traffic explosion lead to many challenges for traditional mobile network architecture on flexibility, scalability, and deployability. Service-based architecture is introduced into mobile networks to meet new requirements in the 5G era. The monolithic network elements are split into smaller network functions to provide customized services. However, the management and deployment of network function in service-based 5G core networks are still big challenges. In this paper, we propose the network automation using Kubernetes for automating application deployment, while using Open-shift Operator as a tool to manage 5G services. This operator lets us deploy all Mosaic 5G inside pods. In this Mosaic 5G Operator, especially in custom resource, we define the composition of core network, Radio Access Network (RAN), FlexRAN, ElasticSearch, and Kibana (as data visualization). For this purpose, we use the containerized OpenAirInterface (OAI) to deploy and demonstrate the automatability with extensive slicing radio support.