Exposing radio network information in a MEC-in-NFV environment: the RNISaaS concept

A Multi-access Edge Computing Platform (MEP), as specified in the relevant

ETSI MEC standards, offers various services, and the Radio Network Information Service (RNIS) is one of the most important of them. This service is responsible for interacting with the Radio Access Network (RAN), collecting RAN-level information about User Equipment (UE) and exposing it to mobile edge applications, which can in turn utilize it to dynamically adjust their behavior to optimally match the current RAN conditions. Putting the provision of RNIS in the context of the emerging MEC-in-NFV environment,

where the components and services of the MEC architecture, including the MEP itself, are integrated in an NFV environment and are delivered on top of a virtualized infrastructure, we introduce the term RNIS as a Service. We present our standards-compliant RNIS implementation based on OpenAirInterface (OAI) and study critical performance aspects for its provision as a virtualized function. In particular, since the RNIS design and

operation follows the publish-subscribe model, we provide alternative implementations

using different message brokering technologies (RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka), and compare their use and performance in an effort to evaluate their suitability for RNISaaS provision.