System and method to support network slicing in an mec system providing automatic conflict resolution arising from multiple tenancy in the mec environment

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-2019104030-A1
Application number	US-201815911216-A
Country	US
Kind code	A1
Filing date	Mar 5, 2018
Priority date	Sep 29, 2017
Publication date	Apr 4, 2019
Grant date	—

Abstract

A method for operating, by an MEC operator, a multi-access edge computing (MEC) system in which applications are provided by MEC tenants for deployment on MEC hosts of the MEC system and in which various levels of privileges are provided by the MEC operator to the MEC tenants. The method includes assigning, by an MEC broker, privileges to the MEC tenants; initiating, by the MEC broker via interactions with one or more of an MEC Orchestrator, an MEC platform manager, and a user app LCM proxy, operations. The operations can include one or more of application package on-boarding, application instance installation on selected MEC hosts, application provisioning, through configuration of appropriate parameters, and application life-cycle management operations including one or more of bootstrapping, termination, migration, scaling. The method further includes pre-validating, using the privileges provided to the MEC tenants, operation requests issued by the MEC tenants.

First claim

What is claimed is:

1 . A method for operating a multi-access edge computing (MEC) system in which applications are provided by MEC tenants for deployment on MEC hosts of the MEC system and in which various levels of privileges are provided to the MEC tenants, the method comprising:
assigning, by an MEC broker, privileges to the MEC tenants; initiating, by the MEC broker via interactions with one or more of an MEC Orchestrator, an MEC platform manager, and a user app LCM proxy, operations including one or more selected from the group consisting of:
application package on-boarding,
application instance installation on selected MEC hosts,
application provisioning, through configuration of appropriate parameters, and application life-cycle management operations including one or more of bootstrapping, termination, migration, scaling; and
pre-validating, using the privileges provided to the MEC tenants, operation requests issued by the MEC tenants by the MEC broker to detect conflicts on the MEC hosts.

2 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising resolving the detected conflicts according to priorities derived from the privileges assigned to the MEC tenants.

3 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising generating, by the MEC broker, an alarm in response to a conflict being detected, wherein the alarm prevents lower priority MEC tenants from executing commands associated with the detected conflict.

4 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein migration comprises offloading, by the MEC broker, an overloaded MEC host by migrating one or more instances of an application running on the overloaded MEC host to another MEC host.

5 . The method according to claim 4 , wherein migration of the one or more instances of the application running on the overloaded MEC host is based on privileges assigned to an MEC tenant that provided the application.

6 . The method according to claim 4 , wherein migration of the one or more instances of the application running on the overloaded MEC host is performed by the MEC broker to reduce a number of conflicts by resources on the MEC hosts.

7 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the application provisioning includes assigning, by the MEC broker, an MEC host to a first MEC tenant of the MEC tenants such that the MEC host runs the application meeting appropriate parameters configuration.

8 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the application provisioning is performed so as to minimize MEC resource usage.

9 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the appropriate parameters for application provisioning include a maximum delay budget for a provisioned application and a maximum delay budget for an MEC host at which the application is to be provisioned.

10 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein the MEC tenants are split into 3 categories:
a Basic category in which MEC tenants are granted the privilege to specify a first delay requirement but no management privileges; a Premium category in which the MEC tenants are granted the privilege to specify a second delay requirement but no management privileges, wherein the second delay requirement is less than the first delay requirement; and a Gold category in which the MEC tenants are granted the privilege to specify a third delay requirement and are also granted management privileges.

11 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising recording, by the MEC broker, commands issued by the MEC tenants to track privileges acquired by each MEC tenant.

12 . The method according to claim 1 , further comprising providing, by the MEC broker, a list of available privileges to the MEC tenants, wherein each privilege in the list of privileges is associated with a corresponding tag, wherein a tag indicates the time validity of the privilege and a priority of a command issued by an MEC tenant compared to priorities of commands issued by other MEC tenants.

13 . The method according to claim 1 , wherein application migration is performed by an MEC host to reduce a number of conflicts.

14 . The method according to claim 13 , wherein the conflicts are detected by the MEC broker.

15 . An MEC system for deployment of applications are provided by MEC tenants, the MEC system comprising:
a plurality of MEC hosts; and an MEC management server including one or more processors and memory, the one or more processors and memory collectively providing an MEC Orchestrator, an MEC platform manager, a user app LCM proxy; and an MEC broker, the MEC broker being configured to:
assign privileges and priorities to the MEC tenants;
initiate, via interaction with the MEC management entities, operations supported by the MEC management entities, the operations including one or more selected from the group consisting of:
application package on-boarding,
application instance installation on selected MEC hosts,
application provisioning, through configuration of appropriate parameters, and
application life-cycle management operations including bootstrapping, termination, migration, scaling; and

pre-validate, using the privileges provided to the MEC tenants, operation requests issued by the MEC tenants to detect conflicts on the MEC hosts.

Assignees

• NEC Laboratories Europe GmbH

Inventors

• Giust Fabio
• Sciancalepore Vincenzo
• Zanzi Lanfranco

Classifications

• H04L67/2804

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L41/5022 Primary

  by giving priorities, e.g. assigning classes of service · CPC title

• H04L41/0816

  the condition being an adaptation, e.g. in response to network events · CPC title

• H04L67/2809

  Electricity · mapped topic

• H04L41/0893

  Assignment of logical groups to network elements · CPC title