Autoscaling Orchestration for Container-based Telecom Microservices

Future mobile network would be much more flexible, dynamic and faster adaptable to match the evolve demand. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is investigated to take the advantage of IT virtualization on telecom by separating virtualization function from underlying dedicated hardware. Container-based micro-service approach is currently discussed as the lightweight virtualization that enables flexibility and scalability of future mobile network. In this paper, we present an orchestration platform by applying the containerization for telco virtualization. We utilize the existing container orchestration platform in IT environment and investigate its scalability in mobile networks. The Evolve Packet Core (EPC) components are instantiated by Docker Swarm orchestrator while Google Kubernetes orchestrator auto-scales the Serving-Gateway (SGW) components. The proof of concepts shows that we can apply the container-based approach for achieving elasticity of future mobile network