A simulative model of a 5G Telco Operator Network

In the near future, an important milestone for the evolution of wireless technologies will be the deployment of 5G network, having the target of supporting very huge data rate generated by a very high number of devices. One of the main technological enablers in this evolution is the joint SDN/NFV paradigm, defined in the last years to support the softwarization process of the Telco Operator networks. Given the very hard quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS) requirements in some application scenarios, mainly in terms of end-to-end delay, a challenging activity is to realize tools that can support network architects in performance evaluation and network design. With this in mind, this paper proposes a simulative tool for 5G networks, which is able to capture delay statistics due to both CPU load and transmission link congestions in NFVI-PoP nodes. The model is then applied to a case study to demonstrate how it can be applied for performance evaluation.