Towards a Cloud Native Micro-services Architecture for Telcos

The telecommunication industry has been experiencing an increase in traffic demand and diversity. This has pushed the industry to be more efficient, adopting solutions like network function virtualization (NFV) and cloudification. However, in order for the industry to benefit from these solutions, existing communication technologies need to be re-engineered. When implementing NFV, the manner of virtualization and the virtualization technologies employed need to be considered. On the other hand, when moving to the cloud, the cloud native principles need to be properly adopted. In this study, we look at the cloud principle of clustering and adapt the micro-services approach in order to satisfy the other cloud native principles. We then consider the benefits and overheads of micro-services, which we conclude to be affected by the level of network function (NF) decomposition, fine or coarse grained. We then identify that the efficient level of decomposition depends on the NFs’ components hence on type individual network function. Lastly, with careful consideration of the virtualization technology and manner, clustering and load balancing techniques, we present a cloud native micro-services architecture that supports different levels of virtual NFs decomposition for efficient performance.