A Zero-Touch as-a-Service Active Monitoring Framework for Virtualized Network Environments

In order to fulfill the stringent requirements of 5G applications, measuring the performance of the VNFs composing the network slices is crucial to identify potential bottlenecks of the networks. However, since the VNF behavior is time varying and strongly depends on the infrastructure and hosting execution environment, the traditional traffic generators are not suited for the evaluation as their overhead, both in terms of deployment time and code complexity, may affect the results to the point of corruption. In order to overcome this issue, this paper presents a software traffic generator, based on TRex and executed in a VNF, which leverages on an automation framework to provide zero-touch as-a-Service active monitoring. Results show that the impact of this solution on the measured performance is negligible in terms of deployment time as well as required input lines.