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Virtualized Evolved Packet Core for LTE Networks (vEPC)

vEPC is a simple virtualized form of Long Term Evolution Evolved Packet Core (LTE EPC). It simulates the working of a typical EPC for handling signaling and data traffic. vEPC is developed in C++11. First opensource version (1.0) was released on June 10, 2016. A more advanced distributed LTE EPC implementation (v2.0) was released on 30th June 2017. vEPC version 3.0 is monolithic EPC over netmap and mTCP (Kernel Bypass) built using non blocking sockets and was released on May 16 2018.

Synopsis

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a popular concept being proposed for redesigning various components in telecom networks. A bulk of NFV design proposals focus on EPC, which faces severe scalability and flexibility issues. This has set a new trend among network equipment manufacturing companies to build commercial implementations of vEPC. All such implementations try to achieve a highly scalable and flexible architecture to suit the needs of future mobile traffic. However, no complete open-source free vEPC exists to the best of our knowledge. Our code is a first step in this direction. Note that our code is not fully standards compliant, and is not intended for commercial use. Our code is intended for consumption by researchers to build and evaluate various NFV-based EPC architectures. The source contains a monolithic implementation of vEPC and a distributed implementation of vEPC.

List of developed software modules

• Mobility Management Entity
• Home Subscriber Server
• Serving Gateway
• Packet Data Network Gateway
• Radio Access Network Simulator
• Sink node

Supported LTE procedures

• Initial Attach
• Authentication
• Location update
• Create Session
• Modify Session
• Delete Session
• User plane data transfer
• S1 Handover

Note: Above packages/tools correspond to linux-based machines

Directory structure

• NFV_LTE_EPC-1.0: Contains a monolithic vEPC source and documentation
• NFV_LTE_EPC-2.0: Contains a distributed vEPC source and documentation
• NFV_LTE_EPC-3.0: Contains monolithic vEPC over netmap and mTCP (source and documentation)

Authors

1. Sadagopan N S, Master's student (2014-2016), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.
2. Pratik Satapathy, Master's student (2015-2017), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.
3. Jash Kumar Dave, Master's student (2015-2017), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.
4. Trishal Patel, Master's student (2016-2018), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.
5. Prof. Mythili Vutukuru, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Bombay.

Contact

• Prof. Mythili Vutukuru, mythili[AT]cse.iitb.ac.in