Traffic Engineered Transport for 5G Networks

Abstract

5G networks have high demands on reliability, latency and bandwidth from IP transport networks that realize the user plane path between gNB and UPF. However, there is no defined mechanism for the 5G network domain and IP transport domain to exchange information regarding these QoS and slicing aspects that need to be granted along the user plane path. Furthermore, the means to transport this meta-data in user plane packets is missing. The Mobile Transport Network Context (MTNC) identifier meta-data proposed here serves as an abstraction for slice, QoS requested by the 5G domain and programmed into paths across IP transport networks. Since the reservations are based on traffic estimates, user session setup does not incur any additional delay. The reservations are shared by multiple flows – thus allowing for very high scalability. This proposal makes it possible to realize the IP transport demands of a 5G system without significant changes to the 3GPP architecture.