Tackling IoT Scalability with 5G NFV-Enabled Network Slicing

With emerging large volume and diverse heterogeneity of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, the one-size-fits-all design of the current 4G networks is no longer adequate to serve various types of IoT applications. Consequently, the concepts of network slicing enabled by Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have been proposed in the upcoming 5G networks. 5G network slicing allows IoT applications of different QoS requirements to be served by different virtual networks. Moreover, these network slices are equipped with scalability that allows them to grow or shrink their instances of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) when needed. However, all current research only focuses on scalability on a single network slice, which is the scalability at the VNF level only. Such a design will eventually reach the capacity limit of a single slice under stressful incoming traffic, and cause the breakdown of an IoT system. Therefore, we propose a new IoT scalability architecture in this research to provide scalability at the NS level and design a testbed to implement the proposed architecture in order to verify its effectiveness. For evaluation, three systems are compared for their throughput, response time, and CPU utilization under three different types of IoT traffic, including the single slice scaling system, the multiple slices scaling system and the hybrid scaling system where both single slicing and multiple slicing can be simultaneously applied. Due to the balanced tradeoff between slice scalability and resource availability, the hybrid scaling system turns out to perform the best in terms of throughput and response time with medium CPU utilization.