Superfluidity is a European Union research project that innovates in the 5G networks domain. It's goal is to design a converged cloud-based 5G architecture which would enable instantiating services on-the-fly, running them anywhere in the network (core or edge) and shifting them transparently to different locations. 18 partners are contributing to the project, including leaders from the IT and Telco industries and from the academia. In this session we'll understand the MEC architecture which supports mixed workloads of VMs and containers sharing one networking infrastructure. We’ll discuss side by side deployment of OpenStack and Kubernetes while leveraging Kuryr to build a single networking infrastructure.

1. Enabling 5G mobile networks through open
source portfolio
Livnat Peer, Red Hat
June 2017

2. Agenda
● EU Projects
● Superfluidity Overview
● Superfluidity NFVO Architecture
● Red Hat Contributions
● Future directions

3. (H2020) EU Projects
● Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever
with nearly 80 billion Euros of funding available over 7 years (2014-2020)
● Emphasis on excellent science, industrial leadership and tackling societal
challenges
● Make it easier for the public and private sectors to work together
● Ensure European produces world-class science and innovation
● Grands in different domains, for example :
■ Excellent Science (such as FET and Marie Curie actions)
■ Industrial Leadership (in Enabling and Industrial Technologies)
■ Information and Communication Technologies → (e.g., Advanced computing, future
internet, robotics, …)
■ Smart, Green and Integrated Transports

4. Superfluidity Overview
● NFV challenges:
○ Long provisioning times
○ Wasteful over-provisioning to meet variable demand
○ Reliance on rigid and cost-ineffective hardware devices
○ Heterogeneity:
■ Traffic and sources
■ Services and needs
■ Access technologies with multi-vendor network components
○ Many others...

5. Superfluidity Overview
● Objective
○ Provide converged cloud-based 5G concept that
■ Enables mobile edge use cases
■ Empowers new business models
■ Reduces investment and operational costs
○ Consortium
■ Academia: CNIT, University Ben Gurion, University of Liege, University of Technology
Dresden, University Politehnica of Bucharest
■ Telco Operators: British Telecom, Telefonica I+D, Altice Labs (Portugal Telecom)
■ Industry: Nokia Bell Labs France, Alcatel Lucent Israel, Citrix, Intel R&D Ireland, NEC, OnApp,
Red Hat, Telcaria, Unified Streaming
○ Budget and duration:
■ Almost 8 million Euros
○ July, 1, 2015 ←→ March, 31, 2018

6. Superfluidity aims at achieving:
Ability to instantiate services on the fly,
Run them anywhere in the network (core, aggregation,
edge)
and Shift them transparently to different locations

7. 5G Networks: Reducing costs through virtualization
Virtualization + control and data plane split: save operation costs, increases
management flexibility

8. 5G Networks: Reducing costs through virtualization
Virtualization + control and data plane split: save operation costs, increases
management flexibility

9. 5G Networks: C-RAN
Centralized and virtualized BBU to save management and operation costs

10. 5G Networks: MEC
TOF
Applications can be deployed at the edge to take advantage of higher bandwidth
and reduced latency
EDGE CLOUD

11. 5G Networks: Big picture

12. Superfluidity NFVO Architecture
Open Source based NFVO Architecture
Red Hat contributions:
● Kuryr
● Neutron
● Openshift-ansible
● ManangeIQ

13. Superfluidity Deployment

14. Red Hat Contributions
● Noisy neighbor problem
○ Neutron QoS to limit max bandwidth
● Speed up network connectivity
○ OVS-Firewall to remove linux-bridge + iptables overhead when connecting VMs to
the Neutron networks
● Speed up reaction to workload fluctuations and consider physical resource
limitations at the edge
○ Work on Kuryr to enable mixed containers and VMs deployments
○ Work on Kuryr to enable nested containers by leveraging Neutron Trunk ports support
(VLAN-Aware-VMs)
○ Work on Kuryr to speed up container boot time when plugged into Neutron networks
● Multi-site and mixed environment management
○ Push ManageIQ as NFVO and enable ansible playbook execution support into it
FIRSTYEARSECONDYEAR

15. Kuryr
● Added vlan trunk support (used in nested containers)
● Ports pool changes (being merged)
**Absolute numbers are irrelevant given the hardware used for testing, the ratio between with/without pool is
interesting

16. ManageIQ
● A management project that enables managing containers, virtual machines,
networks, and storage from a single platform
● Manage IQ connects and manages to your existing clouds: OpenStack,
Amazon EC2, Azure, Google compute engine, VMware, Kubernetes
● Gaps closed by Superfluidity
○ Adding the option to run a generic Ansible playbook to help us close some of the gaps,
including instantiating containers in Kubernetes

17. Other Superfluidity contributions
● NEC work on reducing VM boot time, especially around uni-kernels
● “SplitBox: Toward Efficient Private Network Function Virtualization” university
of Liege, Belgium
● “SymNet – Scalable Symbolic Execution for Modern Networks” - Security
framework for static networking vulnerabilities analysis by UPB
● Intel’s contribution on applications’ KPI and scheduling impact
● Additional Kuryr work -
○ Kuryr heat templates to deploy master and worker VMs
○ Kuryr installation support at openshift-ansible playbooks
● Many other contributions...

18. Future Directions
● Keep contribution to open source projects/communities
● DPDK as a data plane speed up for containers using kuryr
● Related Kuryr enhancement:
○ Multi nic supports
○ Neutron networks creation from Kubernetes cli
● Focus on the MEC management problems (isolation, mutitenancy, …) for
VMs and containers mixed environment

19. Thank you, Questions?

20. Additional Reading Pointers
● h
ttp://superfluidity.eu
●

21. Osp Israel Abstract
You sent: Superfluidity is a European Union research project that innovates in the 5G networks domain. It's goal is to design
a converged cloud-based 5G architecture which would enable instantiating services on-the-fly, running them anywhere in
the network (core or edge) and shifting them transparently to different locations. 18 partners are contributing to the project,
including leaders from the IT and Telco industries and from the academia.In this session we'll understand the MEC
architecture which supports mixed workloads of VMs and containers sharing one networking infrastructure. We’ll discuss
side by side deployment of OpenStack and Kubernetes while leveraging Kuryr to build a single networking infrastructure.

22. 5G Networks: Main idea