Orchestration Architecture for Automatic Deployment of 5G Services from Bare Metal in Mobile Edge Computing Infrastructure

The progress in realizing the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile networks has been accelerated recently towards deploying 5G prototypes with increasing scale. One of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in 5G deployments is the service deployment time, which should be substantially reduced from the current 90 hours to the target 90 minutes on average as defined by the 5G Public-Private Partnership (5G-PPP). To achieve this challenging KPI, highly automated and coordinated operations are required for the 5G network management. This paper addresses this challenge by designing and prototyping a novel 5G service deployment orchestration architecture that is capable of automating and coordinating a series of complicated operations across physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, and service layers over a distributed mobile edge computing paradigm, in an integrated manner. Empirical results demonstrate the superior performance achieved, which meets the 5G-PPP KPI even in the most challenging scenario where 5G services are installed from bare metal.