Description
The Fifth Generation (5G) Radio Access Network will be affected by significant changes. The usage of centralized resources and virtual network functions (VNFs) helps by reducing costs with the operation and acquisition of equipment by allowing the usage of generalpurpose hardware. However, the virtualization of network functions requires the development of new orchestration solutions or the customization of the existing ones in a way they meet the needs of a large and highly volatile environment with specific requirements. In today’s cloud environments, containers are widely used to deploy and virtualize applications. Several studies have already been done to provide VNFs using containers in the 5G scenario. In production environments, however, containers by themselves are not enough and orchestration tools need to be used in addition. The most widely adopted tool is Kubernetes, an open-source and highly customizable container orchestrator. In this context, this paper aims to analyze Kubernetes and its customization points for the usage in the orchestration of virtual network functions in the 5G networks radio access layer, proposing an architecture that aims to supply all the specific needs in this scenario following the standards defined by the standard development organizations. The results of the experiments applied demonstrated that K8S, through customizations, supports the requirements, for example, the positioning of the network functions using the RANPlacer and RANDeployer operators demonstrates an improvement of 230% compared with the native positioning of K8S
