Disaggregated Mobile Core for Edge City Services

Mobile communication networks evolved greatly throughout the years. In the 5G rollout, network densification is needed, due to the new vertical-based data-hungry applications and increased devices, leading to additional costs in the cellular deployment. To solve this issue and optimize the deployment of 5G, one unified network could be devised and shared by multiple operators to deploy their own networks. Within a smart-city network, ways to take full advantage of a neutral hosting architecture begin to appear, which serve various services, like Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) and Internet-of-Things (IoT). At the same time, Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) arises, by maximizing the exploitation of the city infrastructure to reduce latency and remove the computational effort from cloud servers to the edge. This paper focuses on researching a neutral architecture for 5G networks with MEC, to be used in smart cities. The disaggregation of the Core Network (CN) has been provided, and the User Plane Function (UPF) selection has been researched. This is a focal point for network hosting. The proposed approach was tested in a city infrastructure in Aveiro, and test scenarios comprise: (1) the comparison between cloud and edge; (2) mobility scenarios with a handover to assess user plane relocation; (3) different user plane selection; (4) different flow level priority assessments to higher priority services in a full bandwidth occupation scenario; and (5) content distribution. The obtained results show that the deployment of the user plane in the edge brings significant improvements, both in common user traffic and service-oriented traffic; moreover, this outlines the capabilities of this core solution, as well as its limitations, providing a foundation for future works.