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

Abstract

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.