5G experiment design through Blueprint

The 5G technology includes innovative network services that allow vertical players to boost their service portfolio in critical application areas currently not suitably addressed by 4G systems. However, these improvements in both flexibility and performance have some consequences in terms of complexity. Indeed, 5G networks are quite complex systems, and require specific skills on network virtualization and cloud services for taking full advantage of their potential. This may represent a hard entrance barrier for vertical stakeholders willing to deploy new services on 5G networks. Thus, it becomes necessary to introduce some simplified approaches for implementing and deploying services in 5G edge clouds. We propose a solution based on the usage of simple yet flexible service templates, named blueprints. Such templates can be easily filled by vertical players by specifying just the main entities of their service. Each template allows specifying not only the raw structure of a service running in a virtualized infrastructure, but also how to test it in a variety of realistic network conditions. Our proposed tool processes blueprints and translates them into detailed network configuration. This way, verticals are unaware of the underlying operations, saving a significant amount of programming effort. In order to show the effectiveness of our solution and to ease the understanding of technical details, we make use of a vertical service related to the area of pedestrian traffic monitoring in smart cities as a running example. We express the effort saving by means of the well-known COCOMO model, which shows a reduction of about 70% or even more of the programming effort from the vertical.