Flux Research Group / School of Computing

ECHO: A reliable distributed cellular core network for public clouds

Binh Nguyen, Tian Zhang, Bozidar Radunovic, Ryan Stutsman, Thomas Karagiannis, Jakub Kocur, and Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe

Technical Report , University of Utah, Microsoft Research, Core Network Dynamics. 2017.

areas
Mobile Networking

abstract

Echo: A reliable distributed cellular core network for public clouds

Economies of scale associated with public cloud platforms offer flexibility and cost-effectiveness, resulting in various services and businesses moving to the cloud. One area with little progress in this direction is cellular core networks. A cellular core network manages the state of cellular clients; it is essentially a large distributed state machine with very different virtualization challenges compared to typical cloud services. In this paper we present a novel cellular core network architecture, called ECHO1, particularly suited to public cloud deployments, where the availability guarantees might be an order of magnitude worse compared to existing (redundant) hardware platforms. We present the design and implementation of our approach and evaluate its functionality on a public cloud platform.