CAPT: A Context-Aware Stateful Processing Ecosystem for Telco Infra Management

Abstract

Telecommunication networks are evolving to embrace the cloud-native microservice paradigm, necessitating the redesign of existing 5G network products such as the Network Management System (NMS), Core, and Access. While cloud environments enable enterprises to scale applications cost-effectively on demand, effectively utilizing containers without compromising their benefits presents challenges. The NMS plays a crucial role in managing telco elements (TEs) deployed across the country and processing large volume of stateful data per second. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) telecommunications management network defines the stateful NMS management tasks as fault, configuration, accounting, performance, and security (FCAPS). However, containerized NMS exhibits ephemeral state, making its management complex. This paper addresses the challenges associated with stateful storage selection, content placement, and content retrieval operations. To overcome these challenges, we propose CAPT, a Context-Aware stateful Processing ecosystem for Telco infrastructure management. Our approach ensures scalability by associating context information directly with FCAPS and TE type, rather than fixed storage entities, thereby maintaining the location-independent philosophy of cloud-native architectures. Through experiments using real telco field datasets provided by the operator, we demonstrate that CAPT, when integrated with NMS, enables high performance even with dynamic changes in TE count.

Keywords

• 5G networks
• cloud-native
• communication networks
• containers
• context-aware services
• microservices