Extensible Orchestration of Elastic IP Multimedia Subsystem as a Service Using Open Baton

Many recent projects and research activities in the telco sector are adopting the Cloud Computer paradigm consolidating their infrastructures towards converged and all-IP next generation networks providing typical telco services within LTE (and soon 5G) and also fixed network environments, e.g., often still adopting IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture solutions. In this perspective, cloud computing can significantly lower investment risks by implementing telco services with Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) on top of a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Infrastructure. Within this general context, this paper presents the implementation and integration work accomplished within the large EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking project (MCN, 2013-2016) to achieve cost-effective elasticity of IMS-based multimedia applications. The paper shows how it has been designed and implemented an elastic IMS-compliant solution by exploiting the widespread Asterisk server as media gateway. Quality monitoring and scale in/out triggering are obtained through the interaction between the MCN Monitoring as a Service (MaaS) and OpenBaton, i.e., a novel open-source NFV Orchestrator (NFVO) integrated in MCN and fully compliant with the ETSI NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) specifications. The collected performance results of the proposed solution, demonstrates the fully feasibility of the approach adopted and explained in this paper.