2023/12/08 by Tolga Atalay, Dragoslav Stojadinovic, Atalay, Tolga O. +7 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Optical Network Technologies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #IoT and Edge/Fog Computing #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Software-Defined Networks and 5G
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.04833
openalex publication_date 2023/12/08 · openalex created_date 2023/12/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile core network is designed as a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) hosted on Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. This creates a growing demand for general-purpose compute resources as 5G deployments continue to expand. Given their elastic infrastructure, cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are attractive platforms to address this need. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the control and user plane Quality of Service (QoS) performance associated with deploying the 5G core on top of a public cloud. To account for both software and communication costs, we build a 5G testbed using open-source components spanning multiple locations within AWS. We present an operational breakdown of the performance overhead for various 5G use cases using different core deployment strategies. Our results indicate that moving specific VNFs into edge regions reduces the latency overhead for key 5G operations. Furthermore, we instantiated multiple user plane connections between availability zones and edge regions with different traffic loads. We observed that the deterioration of connection quality varies depending on traffic loads and is use case specific. Ultimately, our findings provide new insights for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) for optimal placements of their 5G core functions.