Plug-in over Plug-in Evaluation in Heterogeneous 5G Enabled Networks and beyond

With the cool upcoming wave of 5G, currently networking and telecommunication industries are facing various digital transformations, which are changing the very fundamental nature of the existing network management infrastructure. Besides the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, we also notice that the 5G networks in itself is composed of millions of heterogeneous physical entities and nodes, multiple domains, complex protocols and technologies, different gateways etc. This heterogeneity imposes critical impacts on the application specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, performance and utilization of network resources, and data and user security. In order to alleviate the above impacts, researchers propose to use different technologies such as Software-defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in 5G enabled IoT networking. We notice that the layers over layers (of protocols and technologies) act like a Plug-in over Plug-in (PoP) in the network, in order to accomplish various aims, such as: meeting QoS demands, enhancing security, load balancing etc. On one hand we agree that this integration of different technologies in 5G networks bring numerous advantages, but on the other hand we realize that this has posed a lot of unique critical issues in the modern 5G network management. In this paper, we point out that this straightforward approach of PoP is eventually not a healthy approach for network transformation. In this regards, using Open Source MANO (OSM) we have provided a Proof of Concept (PoC) to show that at varying degree of heterogeneity, PoP adds the delay in the VNF deployment process and further impacts the VIM CPU performance. This eventually affects the QoS requirements of IoT nodes or application. Following this, we have proposed a high level holistic approach that helps to alleviate PoP issue. Finally, in this context, we have also discussed the associated challenges and research opportunities.