Abstract—Network Function Virtualization has recently been gaining a widespread usage in the telecommunication sector and is poised to revolutionize the implementation of the next generation of telecommunication environments. The implementations led by industry are currently focused on achieving the functionality with Common-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware rather than the performance of the service provided. In this paper we have studied the performance metrics that will be significant in the benchmarking of the Virtualized LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC) Environments. Some of the most important and critical performance metrics are CPU Utilization, Memory Utilization, Disk Utilization, and Network Utilization. Each of these is further broken down into sub-categories. These performance metrics are similar to what have been used for server virtualization in the cloud architectures and datacenters but have not been studied for the LTE virtualized environments before. The metrics will play an important role in the achievement of high availability of five nines required by the telecommunication service providers.

Index Terms—Network function virtualization, performance metrics, LTE, Evolved Packet Core (EPC), high availability, telecommunication, service provider.


Cite: Wajid Hassan, Patrick Appiah-Kubi, and Te-shun Chou, "Performance Metrics for Virtualized Telecommunication Environments," Journal of Communications, vol. 12, no. 9, pp. 518-523, 2017. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.12.9.518-523.