From UML Modeling to UPPAAL Model checking of 5G Dynamic Service Orchestration

Abstract

The new 5G technology has the ability to create logical communication networks, called network slices, which are specifically carved to serve particular application domains. Due to the mix of applications criticality, it becomes crucial to verify if the applications’ service level agreements are met, especially for the mission-critical scenarios, before the system is up and running. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for modeling and verifying 5G orchestration of dynamic services, which considers simultaneous access of network slices, admission of new requests to slices, virtual network function scheduling, and routing. Due to the dynamic nature of the problem such verification becomes a challenging issue. By combining the benefits of modeling in user-friendly UML, with model checking using UPPAAL, our framework helps to address the issue by enabling both modeling and formal verification at design stage. We demonstrate our approach on a case study that involves: (i) a mission-critical 5G-assisted robot surgery e-health application, accomplished by using a health slice that is simultaneously accessed by various health professionals using a 5G-enabled camera, and (ii) a less critical video streaming application using a video slice, accessed via various 5G-enabled mobile phones, within the same area as the robotic application. By employing our approach, one can verify that the critical health application meets its timeliness requirements, but also that all slices are eventually served in the system.