Managing and optimizing quality of service in 5G environments across the complete SLA lifecycle

Abstract

The 5G is the fifth generation of mobile broadband, cellular technologies, and networks that promises a major change in mobility by evolving connected business realities. In such an emerging environment, reliable Service Level Agreements (SLA) and anticipation of breaches of Service Level Objectives (SLO) become compulsory. Thus, guaranteeing the required service quality, while also ensuring efficient recourse allocation becomes a challenge. In addition, 5G networks are expected to provide diverse Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for a wide range of services, applications and users with a variety of requirements. However, there is an increased difficulty in translating user-friendly business terms into resource-specific monitoring attributes that can be used to manage resources in the 5G core network. To address these gaps, an SLA management framework, enabling QoS provisioning is introduced. The aforementioned framework will be supported by an adaptive monitoring algorithm, which removes the static time interval used in the monitoring system, in order to provide highly accurate information in real time, without the produce of unnecessary traffic to the network. The proposed architecture also incorporates a recommendation mechanism to determine the significance of various QoS parameters in order to ensure that relevant QoS metrics are included in the SLAs, using enriched metadata information from a Network Function Virtualization (NFV) Catalogue.