Catalog-driven services in a 5G SDN/NFV self-managed environment

With the Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile networks set to arrive within the next years, this new generation will transform the industry with a profound impact on its customers as well as on the existing technologies and network architectures. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will play key roles for the network operators as they prepare the migration to 5G, allowing them to quickly scale their networks. This paper presents a research work undertaken on this new paradigm of virtualized and programmable networks, aiming to address Self-Organizing Networks (SON) scenarios in a NFV/SDN context, focusing on detection and prediction of potential network and service anomalies. Towards this end, the performance management system performs aggregation, correlation and analysis of data gathered from the virtualized and programmable network elements. In particular, customized catalog-driven tools are developed, and the results show that they are able to successfully address these requirements. Current performance management platforms in production are designed for non-virtualized (non-NFV) and non-programmable (non-SDN) networks, and the knowledge gathered from this research brings some new understanding on how management platforms must evolve in order to be prepared for the upcoming next-generation mobile networks.