Procedure-Aware Stateless Systems for 5G & Beyond Core Networks

As public and private cloud-native deployments of the 5G Core (5GC) networks are rolling-out on a wide scale, attention is shifting towards efficient state management. While stateful deployments were the default method in the previous generations of mobile networks, they lack the necessary flexibility that cloud-native orchestration demands. Yet, traditional approaches taken to enable stateless deployments require the operators to sacrifice on performance due to the frequent state transactions. To overcome this issue, in this paper we propose a Piggyback-based and a Proactive-Push approach which allow for procedure-aware stateless 5GC systems. Our evaluations highlight the advantages of the Piggyback approach for two synchronous control procedures, reducing their completion time by 44% and 70% compared to the baseline. For asynchronous procedures, the Proactive-Push approach outperforms the baseline with 13% and 22%. More importantly, these mechanisms do not pose additional overhead on CPU and bandwidth utilization.