Platform-based 5G service design and orchestration.

Summary From the fifth generation onwards, mobile networks will have to support an exponential growth in the number of connected devices of various types, this being one of the pillars of a global strategy of accelerated digitization. In addition to this growth in connectivity, these networks will also have to support and deliver various services for new industries with heterogeneous requirements. 5G network designers and developers are then forced to provide new solutions and optimize existing ones to contain the growing bandwidth demands and higher quality of experience (QoE) expectations. These networks also need to be highly customizable to fit various use cases and highly automated to shorten time-to-market. The expected characteristics of 5G networks have prompted mobile network providers to radically change the way they design and develop their solutions, adopting a strategy where software-based solutions are preferred. As the mobile networking domain and the rest of the IT world converge, mobile network providers can benefit from practices and tools at the forefront of burgeoning software and cloud computing ecosystems. Software network functions would allow these providers to have the levels of programmability and reconfigurability they need to cope with such rapid evolution of mobile connectivity. This thesis aims to provide some optimizations of different parts of 5G networks and how they are deployed and managed, with the hope that this will help solve some of the problems facing mobile network designers. This thesis proposes solutions to specific problems related to physical layer processing in 5G networks for interference mitigation, as well as generic problems related to network automation and customization. In this thesis, we have built a platform, which is used to create end-to-end mobile networks, composed of a radio access network (RAN) platform, network core and orchestration, using the concepts and tools of the meta platform. The first part addresses the issue of inter-cell interference, which is likely to be a handicap with the expected densification of antennas in 5G networks. We propose a solution to mitigate the effects of this interference for transmissions from mobiles to base stations. This solution is based on the multi-receiver detection (JD) technique. It meets the architectural, functional and technical requirements for the integration of JD in practical networks. We integrate the JD solution into a RAN platform in the second part and extend this platform with other functionalities. We take the same approach in the third part of this thesis to provide a solution to automate core network deployment and lifecycle management in a network functions virtualization (NFV) environment and create a reusable core network platform orchestrated by open network automation platform (ONAP).