Towards Efficient and Adaptable Monitoring of Softwarized Mobile Networks

We consider the problem of monitoring in the context of emerging and future mobile networks which are shaping up to feature diverse set of services composed of customized chains of virtual network functions (VNFs) realized over (edge) cloud environments. In such a setting, not only is monitoring a critical component for service quality assurance, but it also needs to be efficient, adaptable and flexible. Informed by the experience analyzing state-of-the-art management and orchestration (MANO) platforms and monitoring solutions for softwarized mobile networks, we present our monitoring system design termed PliMon that aims to meet the above requirements by exploiting diverse temporal variability characteristics across different metrics (measurement features) and VNFs, and by grouping such metrics into tiers based on their relative significance. Using an experimental testbed, we verify the hypothesis that different measurement features and VNFs exhibit diversity in their variability and crucially show substantial reduction in monitoring overhead compared to representative monitoring solution from the literature. Additionally, we integrate PliMon with OSM, a well known open source MANO platform, and demonstrate the salient aspects of our approach using the integrated PliMon-OSM system.