Network Resilience in Virtualized Architectures

Abstract

Network resilience represents one of the major requirements of next generation networks. It refers to an increased level of availability, which is of high importance especially for certain critical services. In this work, we argue for resilience as an intrinsic feature that spans multiple network domains, thereby providing a network-wide failsafe operation. Particular focus is put on virtualized architectures envisioned for 5G and beyond. Contrary to traditional architectures where all network functions were hardware-dependent, a virtualized architecture allows a portion of such functions to run in virtualized environment, i.e., in a telco cloud, allowing thus for a wider deployment flexibility. Nonetheless, parts of this architecture such as radio access might still have strong hardware dependency due to, for instance, performance requirements of the physical nature of the network elements. Capitalizing on this architecture, we shed light onto the techniques designed to guarantee resilience at the radio access as well as the telco cloud network domains. Moreover, we highlight the ability of the envisioned architecture to address security-related issues by applying threat monitoring and prevention mechanisms, along with proper reaction approaches that isolate security intrusions to limited zones.