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Poster: A SDN/NFV-Based IoT Network Slicing Creation System

Conference Paper · October 2018

DOI: 10.1145/3241539.3267745

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Poster Presentation MobiCom’18, October 29–November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India

Poster: A SDN/NFV-Based IoT Network Slicing

Creation System
Meng Wang, Bo Cheng, Xuan Liu, Yi Yue, Biyi Li, Junliang Chen
State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
mengwang@bupt.edu.cn,chengbo@bupt.edu.cn
ABSTRACT

Application Layer
Multi-Flow Transmission

Smart Home Slice

With the emergency of IoT, there are many IoT network slices Smart Cities Smart Home

with different network requirements. Most of the current IoT Internet of

Smart Grid
Vehicles
system are specific and non-programmable and therefore
their slices are difficult to reuse. It is difficult to meet different

Datacenter Slice
VIM

Core Layer
QoS requirements especially in IoT system because there are VIM Cloud Data Center

plenty of IoT sensors in IoT system. In this paper, we propose VNF VNF VNF
Bandwidth:Text>Image>Video

a novel IoT network slicing creation system which based on

two emerging SDN and NFV technologies. It provides an

Transport Layer

Transport Slice
SDN Controller

Bandwidth:Video>Image>Text
easily-operating service creation environment and a service Priority:Text>Image>Video

execution environment based on micro service architecture.

We implement an IoT muti-flow transmission scenario. After

Access Slice
VIM
adding subservices and QoS policies into a business process
Access Layer

VIM Edge Data Center

at the design plane, the IoT scenario can run automatically

at the execution plane. Experiment results on the scenario
Video Image Text

(a) Network (b) Smart Home Slice (c) IoT Scenario

show that the numbers of packets per second of different
flows are changing gradually depend on QoS policies. Figure 1: Network, Slice and IoT scenario

CCS CONCEPTS
• Networks → Network design principles; Network manage-
ment; Mobile networks;
KEYWORDS
Network slices; 5G; IoT; SDN; NFV
ACM Reference Format:
Meng Wang, Bo Cheng, Xuan Liu, Yi Yue, Biyi Li, Junliang Chen.
2018. Poster:A SDN/NFV-Based IoT Network Slicing Creation Sys-
tem. In The 24th Annual International Conference on Mobile Com-
puting and Networking (MobiCom ’18), October 29-November 2, 2018,
New Delhi, India. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. https://doi.
org/10.1145/3241539.3267745
Bo Cheng is the corresponding author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-
party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact
the owner/author(s).
MobiCom ’18, October 29-November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India
© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5903-0/18/10.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3241539.3267745
1 INTRODUCTION
With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technolo-
gies, there have been plenty of IoT applications [1] such as
smart cities, smart home, internet of vehicles and smart grid,
as the Figure 1(a) shows. In this situation, network is facing
a rapid change by embracing Software Defined Networking
(SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). This prob-
lem is particularly difficult in the IoT environment because
there are so many sensors in the IoT environment. The fifth
generation (5G) mobile network slicing with SDN/NFV [2]
is expected to support a multitude of IoT applications. Using
SDN at the transport layer makes it easier to centralize the
network intelligence in the SDN controller. Cloud and edge
datacenter use NFV to decouple the network functionalities
from the hardware. As shown in Figure 1(b), IoT network
slicing based on SDN/NFV provides flexibility and support
for various requirements of IoT applications.
However, there are some existing problems still remain to
solve. Firstly, most of the current IoT system are specific and
therefore the slices are difficult to reuse. Secondly, although
there are many NFV management systems such as [3] [4], we
want a management system that can manage IoT network
slices, VNFs and IoT sensors in a unified way. Thirdly, as the

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Poster Presentation MobiCom’18, October 29–November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India

slice_template:
Workspace
Design Plane

yaml_templates:
VNF1:
properties:
Service 2
Service 1 flavor: m1.small

slice1:
Service 3 Extended-YAML properties:
name: smart_home
Service 5 Service 6 business_process:
Service 4 properties:
s5-s1, s6-s2,

Management and Orchestration Domain

IoT Resource Manager IoT Service Orchestrator
Network Slice Manager Sensor Controller
Session Manager Parser Engine
Slice Manager VNFM Sensor Conf System Monitor Execution Engine
Execution Plane

Slice Monitor NFVO Sensor Monitor Event-driven Concurrent Mechanisum

SDN Controller

VNF Domain
Control Plane

Common VNFs IoT Sensor-VNFs

VNF VNF S-VNF S-VNF
VNF VNF S-VNF S-VNF

PNF PNF
Data Plane

S-PNF S-PNF
PNF PNF S-PNF S-PNF
Common PNFs IoT Sensor-PNFs

Figure 2: The architecture of IoT network slicing creation system.

Figure 1(c) shows, some services are not severely affected 2.1 Design Plane
by temporary interruptions such as video. On the contrary, The Design plane provides a drag-and-drop workspace for
some interruptions may result in loss such as industrial con- end-users to design business process of the IoT network
trol commands transmitted in text. Given these facts, we slices. An IoT network slice contains a set of subservices.
propose a novel IoT network slicing creation system. When a subservice is dragged and dropped into the workspace,
• User can design the business processes of the IoT net- the related information will be written into a YAML script
work slices in the design plane and deploy them in the that we have extended.
execution plane. As the Figure 2 shows, we developed As the Figure 2 shows, the Extended-YAML script is a collec-
various types of subservices. By this way, we can reuse tion of network slice descriptor, VNF descriptor and business
the subservice and design the business process more process information. We can also add polices in the design
efficiently. plane, for example the QoS policies in the IoT scenario de-
• We developed a sensor controller with a protocol stack scribed in Figure 1(c).
that can adapt IoT sensors dynamically. And all com-
ponents in management and orchestration domain are
running in the docker containers and managed by ku-
2.2 Execution Plane
bernetes. We also proposed a novel SDN solution for The execution plane is a service execution environment de-
communication mechanism of kubernetes. signed to enhance the management of network slices, VNFs
• We also developed specific Sensor-VNFs for IoT sen- and IoT sensors.
sors to implement the IoT scenario described in Figure 1)management and orchestration domain: The manage-
1(c). Then we implemented the IoT scenario by us- ment and orchestration domain mainly focus on service or-
ing three S-VNFs and a Priority-based QoS policy. We chestration and resource management. This domain is based
describe the scenario in detail in the implementation. on micro service architecture and managed by kubernetes, a
production-grade orchestrator for containerized applications.
Because the kubernetes network solution is not satisfactory,
2 ARCHITECTURE it can only provide a simple connection function. We ex-
Figure 2 illustrates the design plane and the execution plane tended a SDN controller named OpenDaylight to manage
of IoT network slicing creation system. The former is respon- the kubernets network. In this way, we can solve container
sible for designing and developing IoT network slices. The communication and management problems effectively.
latter takes charge of the execution of the IoT network slices. IoT Service Orchestrator: We have built a parser engine for

667
 Poster Presentation
2.5K
Number of packets per second
2K
1.5K
1K
500
0 20 80 time(s)
Figure 3: Number of packets per second of video
200
Number of packets per second
150
100
50
0
10 70 time(s)
Figure 4: Number of packets per second of text
the Extended-YAML scripts and an event-driven execution
mechanism. After designing the IoT slices, the service plane
sends an Extended-YAML script to the parse engine. The
information parsed from script mainly contains resource and
control information. The former will be sent to the IoT re-
source manager while the latter that mainly includes polices
will be sent to the SDN controller.
IoT Resource Manager: After the Extended-YAML script is
parsed, IoT service orchestrator interacts with IoT resource
manager. The network slice manager takes charge of manag-
ing the lifecycle of slices. The NFVO and VNFM responsible
for the resource allocation and management of VNF lifecycle.
The sensor controller with a protocol stack mainly focuses
on sensor adapting and monitoring.
SDN Controller: We developed a control module in Open-
Daylight to convert the QoS policy added by the user into
a corresponding flow table and send it to the network. The
control module using the Set Queue action in flow table to
schedule traffic of different services to different queues. Then
we can limit and reserve the network bandwidth of a given
service by taking advantage of the maximum and minimum
rates of the queue.
2)VNF domain: The VNF domain is the network infrastruc-
ture resource domain. It is divided into a control plane and
a data plane according to the SDN control and data decou-
pling concepts. The two planes have available VNFs and
PNFs, respectively. Some of these NFs are slice-specific for
IoT environment, such as S-VNF and S-PNF, while others are
common for all network slices.
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MobiCom’18, October 29–November 2, 2018, New Delhi, India
3 IMPLEMENTATION
We have developed three S-VNFs to implement the IoT sce-
nario described in Figure 1(c). The instance contains three
data sources: video, image and text. The text contains some
important commands. We just drag and drop subservices
related to three data sources in the design plane.
At the beginning, the order of bandwidths is video, image
and text. We want to receive commands quickly and video
140 quality is less important to us. So the order of priorities is
text, image and video. We can define priority-based QoS poli-
cies to guarantee the bandwidth of high priority service in
the design plane.
We judge the change of bandwidth by observing the number
of real-time data packets per second. At the beginning, the
number of video packets is about 2.5k while the text is less
than 10. As the Figure 3 shows, the number of packets per
second of video is decreasing gradually. At the same time, the
number of packets per second of text is increasing gradually
described in Figure 4.
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4 CONCLUSION
In this poster, we have proposed a novel network slicing
creation system targeting on the IoT environment. And we
have implemented an IoT scenario to solve the multi-flow
transmission problems that are difficult to solve in the tradi-
tional way.
We also recognize the limitations of our research, and plan
to focus on the following challenges and extensions. Firstly,
optimize the architecture to develop better communication
mechanisms aiming at reducing communication overhead
between modules. Secondly, design resource allocation algo-
rithms to make more efficient use of resources.
5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by the National Key Re-
search and Development Program of China (No.2018YFB1003804,
2017YFB1400603).
REFERENCES
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Service-oriented Authentication Supporting Network Slicing for 5G-
enabled IoT. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications PP, 99
(2018), 1–1.
[2] Jose Ordonez-Lucena, Pablo Ameigeiras, and Diego Lopez. 2017. Net-
work Slicing for 5G with SDN/NFV: Concepts, Architectures, and Chal-
lenges. IEEE Communications Magazine 55, 5 (2017), 80–87.
[3] Ahmad Rostami, Mateus Augusto Silva Santos, and Allan Vidal. 2016.
Multi-Domain Orchestration across RAN and Transport for 5G. In Con-
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