MobileStream: a scalable, programmable and evolvable mobile core control plane platform

ABSTRACTControl planes in future mobile core networks face two new challenges. First, they must scale to process the growing control traffic generated by an ever increasing number of mobile devices. Second, they must be flexible and evolvable to support the range of emerging service abstractions and to realize customized network slices to meet the broad range of requirements of these networks. To address these challenges, we propose MobileStream, a scalable, programmable, and evolvable mobile core control plane platform. MobileStream provides a set of refactored basic building blocks, functionally decomposed from existing monolithic control plane components. It leverages realtime streaming frameworks to assemble, execute, and scale these blocks as streaming control plane applications. Moreover, it allows users to add their own functions to customize and optimize streaming control plane applications. We present several streaming control plane applications to showcase the flexibility and generality of MobileStream. We describe our extensive functional testing, with a variety of mobile devices and base stations, to validate the MobileStream prototype, and present the results of large-scale experiments demonstrating its scalability.