OSM Ecosystem Day: Demonstration of P4-Based In-Band Telemetry for OSM-Orchestrated 4G/5G Testbeds

A demonstration of our research on managing 4G/5G testbeds, part of the 4G/5G research at SimulaMet, is going to be presented at the OSM Ecosystem Day on Wednesday, December 1:

Demonstration of P4-Based In-Band Telemetry for OSM-Orchestrated 4G/5G Testbeds
by Thomas Dreibholz, Chief Research Engineer, SimulaMet, Andrés Felipe Ocampo Palacio, Post-Doc Researcher, SimulaMet, and Mah-Rukh Fida, Post-Doc Researcher, SimulaMet

Abstract: The SimulaMet OpenAirInterface VNF provides an OpenAirInterface-based Enhanced Packet Core (EPC), with separate VDUs for HSS, MME, SPGW-C and SPGW-U. To allow for advanced in-band telemetry, we have extended this VNF to add switches with Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors (P4) to all relevant virtual links inside the EPC. P4 allows full programability of the packet forwarding behaviour, and especially allows to extend packets with additional information for in-band telemetry. This information can be read by other P4 instances to allow for fine-granular performance data collection.
In this presentation and live demonstration, we would like show the solutions chosen to efficiently use OSM for handling our extended EPC, and in particular we would like to highlight the possibilities to perform P4-based in-band telemetry to evaluate the performance of the mobile network. Finally, we would also like to show the audience a live demo of our testbed setup with telemetry collection.