Off late there has been a lot of buzz around network virtualization.
Software
Define networks, Openflow, Nicira
acquisition by VMware,
Xsigo acquisition by Oracle, Wi-Fi
virtualization by AnyFi are few instances.
In the similar lines I was wondering if mobile packet core
can be placed in cloud and whether EPC can run on virtual servers rather than on
custom built hardware. As far as I know
there is quite some work going on in that direction in the industry. To
understand better I tried a little exercise to see if the idea is remotely
possible.
One of my colleagues has registered to Amazon Web Services and got an instance of Ubuntu
in cloud. That means he owns a virtual machine running Ubuntu which can reached
from anywhere in the world by an IP address and a set of encrypted key’s. It
seems it is very easy to setup an instance of linux using Amazon web services and
machine is up and running in matter of minutes. I, myself, have seen over past
few years the physical linux boxes in labs were being replaced with virtual
machines. So virtualization is not a new thing after all. But providing a virtually
instance in cloud, dynamically, and resources (Memory, network cards,
processors) being allocated based on the need is something new and interesting.
So my colleagues Ubuntu instance was up and running.
I took my GTP
code, SGW, that I wrote years ago and ran it on the server. MME was running on my local machine. Couple of
firewall exceptions on server and boom, my local machine and ubuntu on cloud
was nicely exchanging the GTP packets. Well, it’s a client server communication
you don’t need to be an Einstein to make it work; as long as IP’s are reachable
everything is supposed to work. So, here it is my first GTPv2 call over the
cloud onto a virtual server.
It does make me believe that mobile packet core can be
pushed to cloud and onto virtual machines. There are definite challenges, but
over the years it seems to be possible. Imagine bringing up more virtual instances
of EPC components during the peak hours and shutting them down during the nights.
If there are bunch of machines that are going to send one time information
during a particular time of day, we can get the virtual instances ready to take
the explosion of messages and bring down the instances once the information is
exchanged. Resource can be dynamically allocated based on need.
What do you think of this? Does this seem to be a viable
solution?
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3 comments:
Clouds... Pink ponies... All looks so nice on slides... and probably it looks very easy with 1-2 sessions with no traffic, DPI, customers, etc...
Now back to Earth and real life - there are so many non-standard customer specific features, there are so many caveats, the real networks are handling 10s of Gigs, etc... How do you scale, how do you dimension, how do you shut off and on without impact?
One day may be, but not anytime soon...
Yes, agree. Technology is still years away. However we can turn to Amazon for example. AWS lets you see real time information about CPU/Memory utilization of virtual machine and easily allows you to add more memory/processing capabilities. They also seems to have a model where they charge based on the CPU utilization.
It might not make any sense now...but this could be disruptive in next 5 to 10 years :) Agree?
Technology is evolving and everything is possible. Who had an idea that 3G won't last that long? LTE kicked in before even 3G matured.
Cloud infra should be robust to fit EPC in there. Long way to go but Few companies had started their research.
It is good for all of us.
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