Modelling 5G cloud-native applications by exploiting the service mesh paradigm

Abstract

The new-coming 5G network is considered to be one of the most significant innovations today. This is due to the opportunities that is going to provide to the vertical industries. 5G infrastructures will introduce a new way for low-delay, reliable deployment of services. In fact, such infrastructures can be used for the placement of application services in the form of application graphs. An application graph consists of several application components (i.e. micro-services) that may be hosted in the same infrastructure or in different ones. Conflicting requirements that arise when deploying in such infrastructures are now handled through network slicing, which regards a way for partitioning conventional network and computing resources into virtual elements. In this paper, we define a universal application metamodel of a 5G compatible application in order to guarantee the annotation of each application descriptor with its proper requirements for their fulfillment at the instantiation time. In terms of application architecture, we consider each application graph as a service mesh topology in order to adopt this novel service architecture as a dominant methodology that is well fitting in the promising 5G capabilities.