ONF Connect 2019

This presentation introduces a 5G virtualization platform with P4-enabled network slicing and MEC services. The platform is a variant of the ONF M-CORD reference design. We first develop an Ansible playbook to build Kubernetes automatically and configure the container network with Container Network Interfaces (CNIs): Calico, Multus, and SR-IOV. After the instantiation of Kubernetes cluster, the platform uses RedHat Operator Framework to deploy 5G core network services, namely free5GC. The free5GC core network is compliant with the 3GPP Release 15 Service Based Architecture and is an open source project hosted by National Chiao Tung University. However, the AMF and UPF modules of the free5GC have an S1 interface so that the free5GC can interwork with commercial 4th Generation Femtocells.  The components of free5GC, such as AMF, SMF, UPF, etc., are all containerized and running in the Pods monitored by Kubernetes. Furthermore, the platform also adopts Kubernetes CustomResourceDefinition (CRD) to define free5GC as a custom resource (CR) type and a custom controller to watch for new free5GC CR instances and create free5GC instances on-demand. We also implemented GTP Tunnel encapsulation/decapsulation and bandwidth control in P4 switches to support service offloading for Mobile Edge Computing and bandwidth control for Network Slices with different QoS, respectively. Network Slice Selection Function (NSSF) can then select network slices with different bandwidth requirements for users or devices.