1 Introduction

This document provides information about the performance benchmarking of Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Network Exposure Function (NEF) and its microservices.

NEF is a key component of the 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA). NEF provides a platform to securely expose the network services and capabilities offered by the 5G Network Functions (NFs) to either external third-party applications or the internal Application Functions (AFs). As an interface between 5G core network and different application functions, NEF enables the operators to customize their network and provide innovative services to the end users.

NEF communicates with different application functions and the 5G core network to support the above mentioned functions. The application consists of the following components running on separate namespaces in the cloud native environment:
  • Common API Framework (CAPIF): The service interfaces between NEF and the external third-party applications or internal Application Functions (AFs).

    CAPIF is a 3GPP defined secured framework to expose network service interfaces. It enables the API invokers (external applications) to discover and communicate with service APIs of the API provider (NEF). This framework manages API security, logging of events, auditing capability, multiple service exposure, policy based routing, dynamic routing of information, and so on.

  • Network Exposure Function (NEF): The core component that runs the business logic of NEF. It consists of various services that interact with the CAPIF and perform the core functionality of NEF.

Note:

CAPIF and NEF can be installed in different cluster also, but the cluster has to be reachable.

For more information about the services, see Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Network Exposure Function User Guide.

1.1 Purpose and Scope

This document is designed to help operators measure the capacity and performance of NEF, NEF microservices, and deployment environment setup and software details.

The document provides the following information:
  • Benchmarking data of NEF performance and capacity
  • Benchmarking done for NEF Model B deployment
  • Benchmarking done for each service (ME/QoS/TI) separately
  • Performance numbers provided were calculated with pre-loaded database with one million subscription records for ME/QoS/TI microservices
  • The logging levels in all the involved microservices and stubs were set to ERROR
  • Transactions per second for ME/QOS/TI services, when CPU average utilization reaches near about 70 percent
  • Benchmarking data from the Oracle labs
  • Key metrics used to manage NEF performance and capacity
  • Recommendations on how to use the data obtained from the metrics

It is recommended that NEF is run through a benchmark on the target cloud native infrastructure to determine the capacity and performance in the target infrastructure. This information can be used to adjust the initial deployment resources and to help predict resource requirements when NEF is scaled up.

1.2 References

You can refer to the following documents for more information:

  • Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Network Exposure Function User Guide
  • Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Network Exposure Function Installation, Upgrade, and Fault Recovery Guide
  • Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Cloud Native Environment Installation, Upgrade, and Fault Recovery Guide
  • Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, DBTier User Guide