Abstract
Today, modern telco infrastructures are espousing softwarized paradigms (e.g. virtualization, containerization), which are necessary to implement the network slicing, and, consequently, to achieve a beneficial trade-off between service offered and costs. In particular, container-based technologies, when compared to classic virtualized frameworks, offer a lightweight environment to host novel network services. Inspired by these last trends, in this work we propose a statistical characterization of a containerized version of IP Multimedia Subsystem (cIMS), one of the crucial parts of 5G core network. Precisely, we: i) exploit the Queueing Networks (QN) formalism to model the chained behavior of a cIMS infrastructure; ii) perform a statistical assessment aimed at analyzing both the queueing dynamics in different scenarios (single/multi class), and at selecting the optimal cIMS deployment guaranteeing the minimum response time at a given cost; iii) carry on an experimental analysis through Clearwater platform to extract realistic estimates of system parameters.