NFV-Enabled Vertical Scalability for IoT Slices

With network slicing, 5G is able to best support heterogeneous IoT applications each with a specially tailored virtual network, called IoT slice. NFV (Network Function Virtualization) is the key enabler to virtualize a 5G network into multiple IoT slices for different types of IoT applications. All 5G network slices are required to support scalability for their operations in order to deal with dynamic fluctuation of incoming IoT requests. This research focuses on designing and implementing an NFV-enabled vertical scalability system for IoT slices according to their CPU loading. Our system is tested using a traffic generator with three types of IoT services. Each type of IoT services has a different QoS requirement, and the system will forward it to a specific network slice according to its requirement. We will evaluate the performance of vertical scalability by comparing two systems: one system implements vertical scalability followed by horizontal scalability while the other system implements only horizontal scalability. Our aim is to demonstrate that the former involves lower CPU utilization and power consumption while still achieves compatible response time and throughput when compared to the latter.