Elsevier

Computer Communications

Volume 148, 15 December 2019, Pages 17-26
Computer Communications

openLEON: An end-to-end emulation platform from the edge data center to the mobile user

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2019.08.024Get rights and content

Abstract

To support next generation services, 5G mobile network architectures are increasingly adopting emerging technologies like software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). Core and radio access functionalities are virtualized and executed in edge data centers, in accordance with the Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) principle. While testbeds are an essential research tool for experimental evaluation in such environments, the landscape of data center and mobile network testbeds is fragmented. In this work, we aim at filling this gap by presenting openLEON, an open source muLti-access Edge cOmputiNg end-to-end emulator that operates from the edge data center to the mobile users. openLEON bridges the functionalities of existing emulators for data centers and mobile networks, i.e., Containernet and srsLTE, and makes it possible to evaluate and validate research ideas on all the components of an end-to-end mobile edge architecture.

Introduction

The concept of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), formerlyknown as Mobile Edge Computing, was standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and is one of the key enablers for fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks [1], [2]. The MEC paradigm aims at providing computing service closer to the end user by bringing applications and services at close distance to the end-user. MEC is applicable in scenarios where locality and low-latency requirements are essential [3]. As its definition suggests, MEC is not tied to a single radio technology, but embraces both cellular and other radio access technologies such as WiFi. It is also agnostic to the evolution of the mobile network itself and can be deployed in LTE, 4G or 5G networks. For these reason, it is crucial for mobile network operators to understand the impact of MEC on overall mobile system performance in existing networks and to plan network upgrades.

The “edge” is a data center or nano data center deployed close to the base stations inside an operator-owned infrastructure, typically called MEC host, that provides computing functionalities and can aggregate virtualized core and radio network functions of the mobile network. Hence, both the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) and Radio Access Network (RAN), in the form of a Cloud-RAN, can run in the same data center in a virtualized manner. MEC exploits emerging technologies such as software-defined networking (SDN) [4] and network function virtualization (NFV) [5]. While testbeds are essential for research, experimental evaluation and prototype development, the existing landscape of emulators and testbeds does not offer much in the context of MEC as the available ones either target mobile or data center networks separately.

In this work, we aim at filling this gap by presenting openLEON, a muLti-access Edge cOmputiNg end-to-end emulator which spans from the edge data center to the mobile users. openLEON bridges the functionalities of existing emulators, namely srsLTE [6] for the mobile network and Containernet [7], an extension of the popular Mininet [8], to emulate a SDN-based data center network. We make our platform available to the community [9] and share configuration examples and application use cases which allows other researchers to build on them. The objective of openLEON is to enable research experiments in the MEC domain, providing emulation of both data center and mobile network components. While some prior work in this area exists (e.g., [10]), it only supports mobile network emulation and does not include the data center environment. With Containernet, it is possible to connect virtual data center hosts and switches through virtual Ethernet links, while packets are processed using the real Linux protocol stack. Furthermore, hosts have access to all kernel functions of the host. To validate openLEON, we implement and assess several use cases, such as the caching proof-of-concept of [10], the impact of Radio Link Control (RLC) buffer size [11] on latency and video streaming with Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) [12]. We also profile the computational efficiency of openLEON for the above use cases. Note that we intentionally leave out from the openLEON implementation some typical cloud computing aspects such as the tuning of virtual machine allocation policies or measuring energy consumption that are provided by simulators like CloudSimSDN [13].

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 illustrates the rationale for the choice of srsLTE and Containernet as basis for openLEON and provides an overview of existing emulators in the two domains. Section 3 illustrates the openLEON platform and Section 4 provides an evaluation of the use cases and analyzes the computational efficiency of the platform. Section 5 outlines further open research challenges where openLEON can be applied and Section 6 overviews related works in the area. Finally, Section 7 concludes the work and provides final remarks.

Section snippets

Background and motivation

The objective of this section is to answer the question of whether the combination of srsLTE and Containernet is the right set of tools to develop such a end-to-end emulator.

The openLEON platform

This section presents the design of openLEON and the methodology to interconnect srsLTE and Containernet.

Use case evaluation

This section validates the performance of the platform by evaluating a series of use cases (Section 4.2) and analyzing its computational efficiency (Section 4.3).

Open research challenges and application scenarios

This section provides a brief overview of possible uses and application areas of openLEON and exposes as well open research challenges.

Transport. In edge data centers the whole transport, from application server to the mobile terminal, is under the control of the mobile network operator. Conventional transport protocols like TCP are known to perform poorly in such a setting. For example, a sudden cell load increase limits user bandwidth availability [24] and the increased delay, due to large

Related work

This section surveys prior work on emulators for mobile networks (LTE/5G), SDN data centers, and the few recent proposals in the context of 5G and fog computing.

Natively, Mininet does not support specific features of wireless links such as interference, mobility, or channel selection. To overcome such limitation, Mininet-WiFi [32] emulates the wireless channel by exploiting Linux Traffic Control utility to configure the kernel packet scheduler by setting parameters like channel bandwidth,

Conclusion

In this work, we presented openLEON, an open-source platform that enables experimentation and prototyping in a MEC context. We described the key components of openLEON, srsLTE and Containernet, and the architectural challenges we solved to combine them. We evaluated its computational efficiency and assessed specific use-cases. The obtained initial results are promising and open up further areas that are interesting for future research, for example in the context of mobile cloud computing. In

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Madrid Regional Government, Spain through the TAPIR-CM program (S2018/TCS-4496) and the Juan de la Cierva grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, Spain (FJCI-2017-32309).

Claudio Fiandrino joined as a postdoctoral researcher the IMDEA Networks Institute in December 2016 right after having obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Luxembourg. He received the Bachelor Degree in Ingegneria Telematica in 2010 and the Master Degree in Computer and Communication Networks Engineering in 2012 both from Politecnico di Torino. Claudio also holds the 2016 SmartICT Certificate on standardization for business innovation from the joint program of University of Luxembourg

References (39)

  • KumarR. et al.

    Dynamic control of RLC buffer size for latency minimization in mobile RAN

  • GiustF. et al.

    Multi-access edge computing: An overview of ETSI MEC ISG

    IEEE 5G Tech Focus

    (2017)
  • TalebT. et al.

    On multi-access edge computing: A survey of the emerging 5G network edge cloud architecture and orchestration

    IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor.

    (2017)
  • F. Giust, G. Verin, K. Antevski, J. Chou, Y. Fang, W. Featherstone, et al. MEC deployments in 4G and evolution towards...
  • KirkpatrickK.

    Software-defined networking

    Commun. ACM

    (2013)
  • MijumbiR. et al.

    Network function virtualization: State-of-the-art and research challenges

    IEEE Commun. Surv. Tutor.

    (2016)
  • Gomez-MiguelezI. et al.

    SrsLTE: An open-source platform for lte evolution and experimentation

  • PeusterM. et al.

    MeDICINE: Rapid prototyping of production-ready network services in multi-PoP environments

  • LantzB. et al.

    A network in a laptop: Rapid prototyping for software-defined networks

  • C. Fiandrino, A.B. Pizarro, P.J. Mateo, C.A. Ramiro, N. Ludant, J. Widmer, openLEON: an open source multi-access edge...
  • ChangC.-Y. et al.

    MEC architectural implications for LTE/LTE-A networks

  • GrafM. et al.

    Towards bandwidth efficient adaptive streaming of omnidirectional video over HTTP: Design, implementation, and evaluation

  • SonJ. et al.

    CloudSimSDN: Modeling and simulation of software-defined cloud data centers

  • NikaeinN. et al.

    Openairinterface: A flexible platform for 5G research

    ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.

    (2014)
  • GringoliF. et al.

    Performance assessment of open software platforms for 5G prototyping

    IEEE Wirel. Commun.

    (2018)
  • KellerE. et al.

    Live migration of an entire network (and its hosts)

  • WetteP. et al.

    MaxiNet: Distributed emulation of software-defined networks

  • YanJ. et al.

    VT-Mininet: Virtual-time-enabled mininet for scalable and accurate software-define network emulation

  • PeusterM. et al.

    Containernet 2.0: A rapid prototyping platform for hybrid service function chains

  • Cited by (14)

    • A mobility-based deployment strategy for edge data centers

      2022, Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
      Citation Excerpt :

      Seminal works have mainly focused on the definition of architectural design principles [34,30]. Emulation platforms for research in this area have only started to appear recently [13,44,28,19], and little attention has been paid to the problem of resource deployment. EDC deployment is a particularly interesting and challenging problem in the context of smart cities.

    • Measurement-driven design and runtime optimization in edge computing: Methodology and tools

      2021, Computer Networks
      Citation Excerpt :

      Emulators can be used for testing real applications and protocols under network conditions defined by the experimenter, whereas simulators are used for evaluating the impact of design choices and tuning the parameters of operations. openLEON is an end-to-end emulation platform that covers the network between a mobile user and the edge data center [34]. The system is based on srsLTE [41] for the wireless part and Containernet [42] for the emulation of the data center.

    • A survey on the computation offloading approaches in mobile edge computing: A machine learning-based perspective

      2020, Computer Networks
      Citation Excerpt :

      Finally, EdgeCloudSim, Darknet, Google Cloud trace logs, Java, SUMO, Dpatrner, and MapReduce, take the least participations in the literature. Noteworthy, there are plenty of simulators and emulators of MEC paradigms that might be helpful for the readers [114-119]. This subsection tries to answer the following technical question:

    • Optimization strategies for the selection of mobile edges in hybrid crowdsensing architectures

      2020, Computer Communications
      Citation Excerpt :

      Other major use cases of the MEC paradigm include optimization techniques for distributed content discovery and delivery [28,29], caching [30], big data storage and computation [31], and services for smart cities such as localization [32], emergency [33], and public safety [34,35]. We further survey some MEC applications designed to build a MEC end-to-end emulator to evaluate the possibility of bridging the functionalities of an existing data center or mobile network emulators [36]. Moreover, the MEC paradigm is also applied to the possibility of preventing in vulnerable road users through the use of communication capabilities of the current LTE networks as discussed in [37].

    • Handling Data Handoff of AI-Based Applications in Edge Computing Systems

      2023, IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
    View all citing articles on Scopus

    Claudio Fiandrino joined as a postdoctoral researcher the IMDEA Networks Institute in December 2016 right after having obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Luxembourg. He received the Bachelor Degree in Ingegneria Telematica in 2010 and the Master Degree in Computer and Communication Networks Engineering in 2012 both from Politecnico di Torino. Claudio also holds the 2016 SmartICT Certificate on standardization for business innovation from the joint program of University of Luxembourg and ILNAS, the National Standardization Agency. Claudio has been awarded with the Spanish Juan de la Cierva grant and the Best Paper Awards in IEEE Cloudnet 2016 and in ACM WiNTECH 2018. He is member of IEEE and ACM, served as Publication and Web Chair at IEEE CloudNet 2014, Publicity Chair in ACM/IEEE ANCS 2018, Workshop Co-Chair of MoCS 2019 and TCP Co-Chair of IEEE CAMAD 2019. His primary research interests include multi-access edge computing, ultra-reliable and low latency communications and mobile crowdsensing,.

    Alejandro Blanco Pizarro obtained his B.Sc. in Telecommunication Technologies Engineering from Carlos III University of Madrid in October of 2015. In his last year, Alejandro was working in Everis as a Junior Consultant. During the next two years, he continued his studies joining the Double Master’s Degree in Telecommunications Engineering and Multimedia and Communications. His final project of M.Sc was focused on developing an scheduling algorithm in a Cloud RAN, where the computational resources are limited. From September of 2017, Alejandro is working as Ph.D. at IMDEA Networks. His current research is focusing on analyzing and measuring cellular network to enhancement its performance.

    Pablo Jimenéz Mateo holds two Bachelor degrees, one in Computational Mathematics and another in Computer Engineering, both from Universitat Jaume I at Castellón de la Plana (Spain). He also holds two Masters, one in Intelligent Systems from the same university and a MsC in Telecommunications engineering from Universidad Carlos III at Madrid (Spain) where he is currently a Ph.D. candidate on Telecommunications Engineering. His research focus on mmWave networks, more specifically in transport protocols and medium access. Prior to his incorporation to IMDEA Networks his professional experience has focused on several undergraduate internships: in “Generation of georeferenced alerts based on the study of the interaction of users in social networks” (Big Data), “Design and development of a self-organized system for emergency management traffic accesses on Castellón de la Plana” (Intelligent systems) and “Development of an agent based distributed system for the analysis of real-time traffic” (Intelligent systems).

    Carlos Andrés Ramiro is currently a M.S. student in the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. He performed his Bachelor thesis as an intern at IMDEA Networks Institute.

    Norbert Ludant is a Ph.D. student in the Information Assurance program at Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, advised by Professor Guevara Noubir. He received a BS degree in Communication Systems Engineering in 2015, and MS degrees in Telecommunications Engineering and Multimedia and Communications in 2017, from the University Carlos III de Madrid. During these years he did internships both in industry, in Alcatel-Lucent, and in academia, at the 5G Innovation Centre, University of Surrey, where he was involved in large-scale antenna systems research under an European Erasmus+ grant. He joined IMDEA Networks Institute in 2017, where he has worked on traffic profiling, network optimization, and anticipatory networking, all evaluated with real traffic data. He also joined the Signal Processing Group at University Carlos III de Madrid in 2018, where he worked in novel approaches for channel coding. His research interests are in the area of broadband wireless communications, signal processing, security, privacy, and new emerging wireless technologies, among others.

    Joerg Widmer is Research Professor as well as Research Director of IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. His research focuses on wireless networks, ranging from extremely high frequency millimeter-wave communication and MAC layer design to mobile network architectures. From 2005 to 2010, he was manager of the Ubiquitous Networking Research Group at DOCOMO Euro-Labs in Munich, Germany, leading several projects in the area of mobile and cellular networks. Before, he worked as post-doctoral researcher at EPFL, Switzerland on ultra-wide band communication and network coding. He was a visiting researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, USA, University College London, UK, and TU Darmstadt, Germany. Joerg Widmer authored more than 150 conference and journal papers and three IETF RFCs, and holds 13 patents. He serves or served on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Communications, Elsevier Computer Networks and the program committees of several major conferences. He was awarded an ERC consolidator grant, the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, a Spanish Ramon y Cajal grant, as well as best paper awards at IEEE ICC, IEEE PIMRC, IEEE WoWMoM, ICST WICON, IEEE MediaWiN, NGC, and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award. He is senior member of IEEE and ACM.

    View full text