5G EVE Monitoring Framework presented at EuCNC 2020

Posted 7 July 2020

At the 29th edition of EuCNC (16-18 June 2020), which was held as a virtual conference, Ramón Pérez from Telcaria Ideas presented the monitoring framework designed and implemented in the 5G EVE project. The work entitled “A Monitoring Framework for Multi-Site 5G Platforms” was carried out by 5G EVE consortium partners Telcaria Ideas S.L. and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The 5G EVE presentation in the EuCNC session on “Operational & Experimental Insights” introduced the key aspects of the high-level design, implementation and performance evaluation of the monitoring architecture built in 5G EVE to collect values of metrics and KPIs generated during the execution of the experiments.

In particular, the proposed architecture defines several building blocks to enable the collection, distribution and pre-processing of monitoring data, satisfying all the requirements imposed by the 5G EVE project. In particular, it counts with the Metrics Management entity, whose main role is to properly configure the other components of the architecture. These components are the Metrics Extractor Function (MEF), which takes care of extracting and translating (if required) the metrics generated by a heterogeneous set of infrastructure components, the Broker System, in charge of storing and distributing the monitoring data, differentiating between the Intra-site broker (deployed per site, whose role is to eventually harmonize the metrics’ format to provide data in an unified way, preserving the data privacy of each site) and the Inter-site broker. The Inter-site broker interconnects all sites to aggregate metrics through the Metrics aggregation, and directly provides them to the different tools grouped in the Monitoring/Results collection/KPI tools entity, which lays the ground for a set of value-added additional components.

Figure: 5G EVE’s high-level monitoring architecture

The instantiation of this monitoring architecture over the 5G EVE architecture results in the composition of a specific component chain. Its cornerstone is the publish-subscribe messaging pattern. It provides a distributed system with parallel data processing capabilities which allows meeting the requirements set for the monitoring platform. This paradigm suits the multipoint-to-multipoint monitoring data flow of the 5G EVE project. It is closer to a big data pipeline rather than to a classic relational database model, as a massive volume of data is pushed from site facilities without a specific format, which is not suitable to be stored in a relational model.