5GTopoNet: real-time topology discovery and management on 5G multi-tenant networks

The Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile networks leverage virtualisation and softwarisation to reduce both capital and operating expenditures whilst benefiting from network programmability and flexibility for various use cases. Meanwhile, virtualisation and softwarisation introduce unprecedented complexity to network infrastructure topologies, which poses substantial challenges to network topology management. This paper proposes a novel architecture to enable network administrators to achieve real-time network discovery and spatial representation of the software data path, containers, virtual machines, and geographically distributed edges to help network troubleshooting and management tasks. Another important innovation is the flexibility to support a significant number of business roles by means of a novel method to perform data model alignment between different business roles. The architecture has been designed, prototyped and validated, and experiment results have demonstrated promising scalability of the proposed solution.