ntelligent Disaster Recovery of 5G Operation, Management, and Control Systems of 5G Infrastructures
5G, Disaster Recovery, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Function Automation
The increase in the complexity of fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks, caused by the high number of mobile devices, along with the increased demands with respect to new application requirements, requires the employment of management systems capable to provision 5G networks always best connected and best served. With this in mind, network operators employ Operation, Management, and Control (OMC) centers, an ecosystem
entailing different technologies and tools that interoperate to provide ultimate operations and management functions designed to keep the network alive with guaranteed levels agreed in SLA (Service Level Agreement) over time. An OMC is strategically constructed in a centralized environment facility and has the role of being able to respond to the occurrence of a "disaster", meaning events that potentially yield a certain level of network
service unavailability. As a way to guarantee some level of fault tolerance, redundant OMC instances must be adopted, where a backup OMC must assume control when a principal OMC instance fails. A Disaster Recovery System (DRS) has the goal of assigning which OMC instance takes the principal control inside a 5G ecosystem. To this, the DRS constantly monitors the 5G ecosystem in pursuit of detecting disaster events so that assigning a backup OMC to assume the principal control.
Based on the fact that DRS mainly operates in a reactive manner, meaning that the switching between OMCs is done after detecting a disaster occurrence, this master’s research devotes to exploiting Machine Learning techniques to efficiently control the assigning of multi-redundant OMCs in the control of 5G networks. To this end, the iDRS (Intelligent Disaster Recovery System) is introduced, which is based on predictive analyzes to act proactively in the attribution of OMCs control, in the hypothesis of provisioning an efficient and agile system to maintain 5G networks throughout their lifetime.