Analyzing the Impact of Micro Data Centers Failures in Cellular Networks: a Road Race Study

With the continuous growth of the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet, cellular network infrastructure owners are facing several new challenges. The fifth generation of mobile technology (5G) is planned to enable a fully mobile and connected society and to empower socio-economic transformations. In 5G, different scenarios with high and strict requirements are being deployed. To deal with such heterogeneity, more advanced communication services are required. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with distributed micro data centers (MDCs) can improve the management of the data flows through several 5G base stations. On the one hand, NFV provides high scalability without requiring significant architectural changes; and on the other hand, distributed MDCs decentralize architecture management, bringing the computational capabilities nearer to the base stations, hence reducing transmission delay. Nonetheless, the introduction of MDCs raises new points of failures in the architecture, impacting user experience. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of allocating MDCs to host base station functionalities; similarly, network functions run as virtual machines in the MDC, and their failures cannot be ignored. We consider a real footrace scenario as a case study. As packets are lost due to the high mobility of the runners and spectators we examine this metric. From simulations results, we discover that as the number of MDCs increases, the number of failures increases as well. However, the impact of each failure in terms of lost packets decreases considerably when considering scenarios with more MDCs. For example, by increasing the number of MDCs from one to seven, the failure impact in terms of lost packet drops by around 87.62%.