A MECApp-aware Lifecycle Management Approach in 5G Edge-Cloud Deployments

Paolo Bellavista, Armir Bujari, Luca Foschini, Andrea Sabbioni, Riccardo Venanzi

Abstract: The recent trend pushing towards reliance on edge computing, virtualization and programmatic 5G network control has sparked the development of a myriad of open-source resource management and orchestration projects for improved control and added flexibility, making up for a rich and complex ecosystem of frameworks and tools with varying degree of support for standardized features. In this technological panorama, the ETSI Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) standard proposes a conceptual reference architecture, standardizing edge integration, interoperability and application management in an extended 5G edge-core architecture. In this context, we propose an application-aware orchestration solution for 5G edge-core distributed deployments, currently lacking support in state-of-the-art frameworks and tools. The proposal is built on an experimental and distributed deployment of the OpenAirInterface minimal MEC platform implementation and relies on the Kubernetes Operator pattern for the automatic MECApp lifecycle management. To validate our approach, we conduct a series of experiments, reporting key metrics of interest.