Evaluating RPC for Cloud-Native 5G Mobile Network Applications
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Publicerad
2020
Författare
Kraft, Hanna
Johansson, Rasmus
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
This thesis investigates the communication between services in 5G network functions.
The development of the 5G Core (5GC) is by design increasing the amount of
communication needed in the control plane. The reason for this is the migration to
the cloud and the adoption of a microservices architecture. The telecommunications
domain sets strict requirements on performance, which implies the need for the implementation
of inter-service communication to be carefully constructed. This thesis
evaluates the use of Remote Procedure Call (RPC) as inter-service communication
in a 5GC network function. The purpose is to evaluate whether RPC frameworks
will fulfill the requirements of inter-service communication and the strict requirements
on telecom applications. The frameworks evaluated are gRPC and Apache
Thrift. We also compare the frameworks to a TCP solution since this is the approach
currently considered for this use case and a solution with minimal overhead to the
communication. The evaluation is both quantitative, with benchmarks on latency,
throughput and CPU usage, and qualitative where qualities such as availability and
ease of development are evaluated. From the evaluation, we can conclude that using
RPC frameworks would suit most needs. Even if the evaluated RPC frameworks
perform slightly worse than a reference TCP solution in the quantitative evaluation,
they can provide many other benefits such as bidirectional streaming RPC and highavailability
features. Among the evaluated RPC frameworks, Apache Thrift stands
out slightly in terms of performance, while gRPC stands out in the qualitative evaluation.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
RPC , inter-service communication , 5G , 5G Core , Network Function , Microservices , Cloud-Native