Open, Programmable, and Virtualized 5G Networks: State-of-the-Art and the Road Ahead
Open, Programmable, and Virtualized 5G Networks: State-of-the-Art and the Road Ahead
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DOI：
10.1016/j.comnet.2020.107516
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发表时间：
2020-12-09
影响因子：
5.6
通讯作者：
Melodia, Tommaso
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bonati, Leonardo;Polese, Michele;Melodia, Tommaso
第五代(5G)蜂窝网络将服务于各种不同的使用案例，包括移动宽带用户、超低延迟服务和大规模密集连接场景。由此产生的多样化通信需求将要求联网具有前所未有的灵活性，这是目前4G蜂窝网络的单一黑匣子方法所不能提供的。研究界和越来越多的标准化机构和行业联盟已经认识到，网络功能的软件化、虚拟化和拆分是向灵活性转变所需的关键推动因素。特别是，软件定义的蜂窝网络被誉为满足新的应用驱动的流量需求和支持高度时变的拓扑和干扰动态的主要技术，因为它们通过定义良好的接口和可编程性来实现快速和响应的网络优化。引领着这一方向的技术创新，几个基于5G软件的项目和联盟已经采用了开源方法，使新的库和框架可供无线社区使用。然而，这场开源软件化的竞赛导致了解决方案的泛滥，它们的互操作性和交互往往不清楚。本文以全栈和端到端的视角，提供了第一个凝聚和详尽的最近5G蜂窝网络开源软件和框架的概要。我们详细介绍了他们的能力和功能，重点是他们的构成要素如何适应5G生态系统，并揭示了调查的解决方案之间的相互作用。最后，我们回顾了这些框架可以在其上运行的硬件和试验台，并对最先进的限制以及完全开源、可编程的5G网络的可行方向提供了批判性的观点。
Fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will serve a wide variety of heterogeneous use cases, including mobile broadband users, ultra-low latency services and massively dense connectivity scenarios. The resulting diverse communication requirements will demand networking with unprecedented flexibility, not currently provided by the monolithic black-box approach of 4G cellular networks. The research community and an increasing number of standardization bodies and industry coalitions have recognized softwarization, virtualization, and disaggregation of networking functionalities as the key enablers of the needed shift to flexibility. Particularly, software-defined cellular networks are heralded as the prime technology to satisfy the new application-driven traffic requirements and to support the highly time-varying topology and interference dynamics, because of their openness through well-defined interfaces, and programmability, for swift and responsive network optimization. Leading the technological innovation in this direction, several 5G software-based projects and alliances have embraced the open source approach, making new libraries and frameworks available to the wireless community. This race to open source softwarization, however, has led to a deluge of solutions whose interoperability and interactions are often unclear. This article provides the first cohesive and exhaustive compendium of recent open source software and frameworks for 5G cellular networks, with a full stack and end-to-end perspective. We detail their capabilities and functionalities focusing on how their constituting elements fit the 5G ecosystem, and unravel the interactions among the surveyed solutions. Finally, we review hardware and testbeds on which these frameworks can run, and provide a critical perspective on the limitations of the state-of-the-art, as well as feasible directions toward fully open source, programmable 5G networks.