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Projecte llegit

Títol: Analysis of CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Datacenter) projects: Deployment on broadband and mobile networks

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: RINCÓN RIVERA, DAVID

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: Analysis of CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Datacenter) projects: Deployment on broadband and mobile networks

Data inici oferta: 17-07-2020     Data finalització oferta: 17-03-2021


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG SISTE/TELEMÀT
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): AGUSTÍ TORRA, ANNA
 
Paraules clau:
SDN, P4, PON, 5G
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
CORD (Central Office Rearchitected as a Data Center) is a new architecture for Passive Optical Networks. Basically, it consists on virtualizing all the elements of xDSL and passive optical access networks, following the SDN and NFV approach. See http://opencord.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/BBWF-CORD.pdf It is supported by big players in the telco industry such as AT&T and Telefonica.

OpenCORD (https://opencord.org/) is an open implementation of CORD, based on OpenStack/Dockers, the ONOS SDN controller, and an orchestrator called XOS. We have two running installations of Cord-in-a-box, in both our own server and a cloud server provided by OpenCORD.

In previous Bachelor and Master theses we have been documenting the installation, structure, and started testing and developing several extra services:

https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/119461
https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/124602

In this follow-up, we propose to:

- Explore the 5G-related capabilities such as slicing in Mobile CORD (M-CORD): set up a testbed and run tests.

- Explore how to coordinate access and core networks by making their respective SDN controllers or orchestrators cooperate (for example, in order to provision users, or ensure QoS)

- Explore how to enhance the monitoring capabilities of both OpenStack and ONOS in order to optimize resource allocation (for example with the goal of reducing energy consumption. Check our previous works related to this goal here: https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/91231, https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2099.1/22385

- Creation of a "dummy" OLT module in order to make the CORD deployment closer to reality.

- Comparison of the CORD with our SDN-SIEPON architecture (https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/107745) and exploration of the integration of both approaches.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Current telecommunications providers have started redesigning their networks to embrace cloud computing principles and overcome future challenges as coping with the increasing traffic demand or the appearance of new services. Among these approaches, the CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Data Center) platform developed by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) stands out.

To demonstrate that access networks can be based on commodity hardware, and follow SDN and NFV concepts, the ONF has developed several reference designs. Based on the CORD platform, these designs are built upon open source components and involve both broadband and mobile networks.

In this thesis, and given its expected impact on research and teaching, we will analyze the CORD projects focused on the residential network (SEBA), mobile core (OMEC) and radio access (SD-RAN), including the convergence of all previous projects into a single platform (being the goal of COMAC, currently in its first development phase).

As the aforementioned projects require a considerable amount of computational resources, our practical analysis tasks have been performed with the ¿in-a-Box¿ emulated versions of SEBA and COMAC, known as SiaB and CiaB respectively. This way, we have proceeded to their deployment, to later analyze its architecture, interfaces and expected features.

Once SiaB has been deployed, we have migrated the installation to an emulated P4-compliant aggregation switch, the new and promising NG-SDN architecture set to replace OpenFlow. After a successful migration, we have quantified its energy impact and analyzed in more detail the new interfaces.

Regarding CiaB, we have enhanced its emulated RAN infrastructure, simulating multiple mobile devices. Therefore, we have managed to execute for the first time CiaB with several simultaneous subscribers, documenting the development process.

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