Programming Tools for Rapid NFV-Based Media Application Development in 5G Networks

Abstract

The emergence of virtualisation and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) have dramatically transformed the telecom industry through network function virtualisation (NFV). A recently introduced cloud-native concept, Platform as a Service (PaaS), ensures to further boost the performance, portability and cost efficiency of the NFV. The 5G-MEDIA project proposes the application of a serverless paradigm known as Function-as-a- Service (FaaS) to NFV for the media applications exploiting the 5G technologies. In addition to integration of FaaS, the 5G-MEDIA application/service development kit (SDK) supports microservice-based application development for both hypervisor-based and containerized approaches, specifically supporting Docker, unikernel and LXC. In this paper, we provide an overview of the 5G-MEDIA SDK which is built to support NFV-based next generation media applications and to achieve a development time in the order of minutes. Furthermore, implementations of FaaS Emulation and FaaS command line interface (CLI) tools are also presented.