Advanced NFV Features Applied to Multimedia Real-Time Communications Use Case Ana Pol ∗, Anton Roman ∗, Panagiotis Trakadas†, Panagiotis Karkazis†, Evgenia Kapassa‡, Marios Touloupou‡, Dimosthenis Kyriazis‡, Juan L. de la Cruz§, Pol Alemany§, Ricard Vilalta§, Raul Munoz§ ∗Quobis, O Porrino, Spain, Email: [ana.pol,anton.roman]@quobis.com †Synelixis Solutions S.A. 157, Perissou, str., 14343, Athens, Greece, Email: [ptrak,pkarkazis]@synelixis.com ‡Department of Digital Systems, University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece, Email: [ekapassa, mtouloup,dimos]@unipi.gr §CTTC, Castelldefels, Spain, Email:[jdelacruz,palemany,rvilalta,rmunoz]@cttc.es Abstract — Real-time communications are services with very application service on top of the SONATA (powered by demanding requirements in terms of reliability and Quality of 5GTANGO) service platform. Service (QoS) that is not easy to be reached. 5G technologies provide tools and techniques that promise to overcome the The remaining of the paper is organized as follows. Section current shortcomings and thus give the opportunity to service II presents the state of the art of this work, while Section III providers to offer better services to the end users. This paper introduces the overall SONATA (powered by 5GTANGO) aims at describing how an existing real-time communications Service Platform. Section IV describe in detail then enhanced service can leverage the innovative features offered by the proposed features, specially focusing on the recently new- SONATA Service Platform (SP), such as network slicing, added features such as QoS and multi-WIM support. This automated monitoring management and Service Level section describes also the principles of SONATA (powered Agreement (SLA) enforcement, to meet the challenging requirements of the service. In this paper, we especially focus on by 5GTANGO) Monitoring Manager as well as the insights the specific mechanisms implemented to support different QoS of the realization of the SNMP solution that has been utilized profiles at network level and automatic scale in/out of the service in this pilot. Additionally, this section presents the role of the depending on the system load. SLA Manager and how it enables the definition and enforcement of SLAs, as well as the Slice Manager which Keywords— Real-time communications , 5G technologies , helps to meet the QoS requirements of the network service. QoS Enforcement , SLAs, Monitoring, Slicing Section V presents the corresponding real-time communications use case, while Section VI states the evaluation of the proposed architecture. Finally, in Section I. INTRODUCTION VII, we close up with ideas for future experiments and current While the 5G concept is still rather unclear in study capabilities. certain dimensions [1], the evolved 5G network will be, for sure, characterized by agile, resilient and converged network II. STATE OF THE ART realization, based on one hand on the disruptive core and Active and advanced work has been conducted on radio access technologies and on the other hand on the multimedia real-time communications use cases implied in network softwarization context brought by Network Function 5G-enabled network softwarization technologies. In this Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking direction, there are several approaches and architectures (SDN) technologies. In the network softwarization frontier, enabling effective communication between IP Multimedia a handful of commercial as well as open source Management Subsystems (IMS) and Web Real-Time Communication and Orchestration (MANO) platforms have emerged (e.g. (WebRTC) users. The authors in [8], introduced a novel OSM [2], ONAP [3], Cloudify [4], SONATA [5], OPNFV architecture supporting WebRTC users for smart community [6]), considered as suites of functionalities for the services, and proposed an optimization model to design and management and orchestration of virtual resources related to allocate resources for such systems while ensuring the desired the instantiation of Network Services (NS) consisting of QoS level. Furthermore, worth mentioned is the work Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and their real-time conducted in [9], where the authors presented an open-source provisioning. platform enabling developers to create and deploy RTC applications with advanced media processing capabilities. These MANO platforms are expected to add value to For this, they introduced the concept of Media Pipeline which operators by reducing costs and deployment time and is in fact chains of interconnected media processing elements. simplifying the management of the VNF and NS throughout Their approach was also based on ETSI NFV their lifecycle. By capitalizing on the implemented techniques recommendations. Henceforth, another interesting work was of the 5G innovative concepts, these platforms are able to introduced in [10]. In this paper, a set of three software accommodate different types of services and deal with the architectures were introduced for efficient virtualization of complexity of the NS-specific requirements. SONATA IMS in different operator environments responding to the platform is an open source MANO framework whose high-level requirements of the ETSI NFV use case for functionalities are currently extended under the scope of the virtualizing operator core network functions. In addition, 5GTANGO H2020 project [7], offering unique advantages based on their experiments, they have successfully managed and innovative features demanded by real use cases. In to simplify the deployment and runtime orchestration of such particular, those features include a) an automated network a virtual service on top of a cloud infrastructure. Not only that, monitoring framework, b) novel policy and SLA management but also in [11], an analysis of next generation network and c) implementation of network slicing. This paper architectures enabling real time multimedia communications describes and evaluates the implementation of a real-time was conducted. The novelty and contribution of this paper lies in the fact described in sub-section F of section IV. Additionally, the SP that: a) the described functionalities are already implemented follows a policy-driven approach through the Policy and given to the research and industrial community as open Manager, meaning that the full operations can be controlled source code, and b) the evaluation is based on a real service by a set of policies that determine the behavior of the NSs. provided by Quobis offering a first-class opportunity to Policies materialize the zero-touch service management validate the benefits of the implemented 5G network (ZSM) concept, enabling the automation of the decision- softwarization characteristics. making process. Another new component is the Slice Manager, which is described in more detail in sub-section G III. SONATA SERVICE PLATFORM OVERVIEW of section IV, allowing the creation of multiple slices on top Before proceeding with the description of the service and of a single infrastructure. For that, it uses NFV artifacts as the results of our work, we will briefly describe the main building blocks (i.e. NSs), interconnecting them in order to components of the SONATA (powered by 5GTANGO) build end-to-end slices, capable to cope with the 3GPP platform. In brief, its open source software is comprised by requirements. Moreover, in order to monitor not only the three main components: the Software Development Kit infrastructure resources, but the performance of a service (SDK) [12], the Verification and Validation (V&V) either on VNF or NS level, the SP includes a Monitoring Framework [13] and the Service Platform (SP) [14]. The Manager, with new features, enabling the proper management entry point of the SONATA platform is the SDK, which is a of the use case specific requirements, as will be described in CLI based toolkit that allows NS packages creation, on- sub-section C of section V. At a lower level, the SP takes boarding, towards the V&V component that is responsible for advantage of the MANO Framework, implementing the the verification and benchmarking of NS’s and their functions of Network Service Orchestration (NSO), Resource constituent VNFs. Afterwards, the SP takes the control of the Orchestration (RO) and VNF Management. Mapping to the NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) features. ETSI NFV Architecture, this roughly corresponds to the NFV Figure 1 depicts the overall SONATA (powered by Orchestrator (NFVO) and VNF Manager (VNFM) 5GTANGO) service platform architecture, indicating the components. In terms of infrastructure, the SP is ready to interactions between the SP and the rest of the components. support multiple NFV Infrastructures (NFVIs) and VIMs, The main focus of this paper will be in the description of the using an Infrastructure Adaptor (IA) component to abstract internal components of the SP, giving emphasis to advanced the particularities of each infrastructure. Currently, two features that provide support to a real-time communication technologies are supported, Openstack and Kubernetes, but NS, running on top of a virtualized infrastructure. others can be added by extending the platform with new plugins. IV. PROPOSED FEATURES This section describes the proposed features that was introduced into the SONATA (powered by 5GTANGO) SP architecture, that allow the enhanced management and orchestration of a real-time communication service. The next subsections are going to describe advanced features like a) End-Point Support, b) Multi-WIM and QoS Support, c)