A scalable monitoring framework for network slicing in 5G and beyond mobile networks

An efficient and scalable monitoring system is a critical component for any network to monitor and validate the functioning of the running services and the underlying infrastructure. This is more valid in 5G, as it relies on the network slicing concept, which adds many challenges to the monitoring system. Besides data isolation and multi-tenancy support, network slices require monitoring different types of resources, like RAN, computing, memory, network data rate, which belong to different technological domains, managed by different entities. Moreover, the monitoring system needs to be scalable, as in 5G a high-number of running network slices is envisioned. In this paper, we devise a novel monitoring framework for network slicing ready mobile networks, which features: 1) scalable monitoring system that supports a high number of running network slices in parallel; 2) technological domain agnostic thanks to a novel data collection (or monitoring) communication protocol; 3) support of multi-tenancy in a cloud-native environment. The framework has been implemented in a 5G facility, and its performance has been extensively evaluated.