Virtual Open Systems Scientific Publications

Introduction

The recent convergence of key virtualization technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) and Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems, has pushed the traditional centralized cloud computing architectures to the edge of the network, in close proximity to the end devices. Multimedia applications are among the most beneficial from the cloud evolution which brings minimized latency, offloading network traffic and computing power, local caching, flexibility and added security. However, the edge computing paradigm will stay on only if it meets the newly opened challenges including scalability, usage of heterogeneous resource-constrained devices, limited network throughput etc.

The first step towards a successful application of edge computing principles is the evaluation of the different components involved in one such framework. In this work we focus on the management of an edge computing infrastructure which is performed by Virtualized Infrastructure Managers (VIMs) as defined by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). In particular we analyze the time overhead which virtual machines (VMs) provisioning brings into the system. We do a comparison of two widespread open-source solutions - OpenStack and OpenVIM by extending and utilizing the capabilities of an open-source benchmarking framework called CloudBench.