Leveraging the cloud-native approach for the design of 5G NextGen Core Functions

Abstract

Due to the ever-growing market needs and extension to different industries, the design of the 5G Next Generation (5G NextGen) Core is on the verge to evolve towards a service-based architecture. Therefore, this paper presents a novel approach to run the 5G NextGen Core Functions as Cloud-Native applications that can be easily scaled on demand to match the constraints of different verticals. In our setup, we employ the Open5GS open-source tool that runs in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes while we simulate consequent PDU session establishment requests using the UERANSIM emulator. Hence, we deploy a service mesh solution that reveals real-time inter-service communication in terms of traffic distribution, requests duration and throughput among all 5G core services.