Cloud Native 5G Virtual Network Functions: Design Principles and Use Cases

The advent of 5G and its ever increasing stringent requirements for bandwidth, latency, and quality of service pushes the boundaries of legacy Mobile Network Operators' technologies. Network Function Virtualization is one promising attempt at solving those challenges. At its essence, NFV is about running network functions as software workloads on commodity hardware to optimize deployment costs and simplify the life-cycle management of network functions. However, with the advent of open source cloud native tools and architectures, early VM-based NFV designs may need to be upgraded to better benefit from new trends. We propose to review current NFV management solutions and a definition of the cloud native toolbox in the context of NFV. We then present a cloud native software platform allowing MNOs to expose their assets: networking resources, mobile services, and cloud computing to Over-The-Top players: 5GaaS. We also introduce our open source Cloud Native VNF API design as an application of the proposed design principles and describe from a standard perspective the feasibility of our prototype.