Usage-Aware Protection Plan for State Management Functions in Service-Based 5G Core Network

Abstract

In service-based 5G core networks, the mobile core functions can be decoupled as "stateless'' control functions and state management functions to support fast failure recovery and independent scalability. With the arrival of the network function virtualization framework, these 5G mobile core functions can be deployed as virtual network functions over geo-distributed cloud infrastructures without much effort. With this new service-based 5G architecture, the availability of the core network depends on the availability of these state management functions. Therefore, protection plans are required to protect these state management functions. In this paper, we present a model to optimally place the standby functions protecting the active state management functions over geo-distributed cloud infrastructures. This model considers the constraints related to state management functions and considers a new factor (i.e., availability zones) in the estimation of the availability level of each protection plan. We focus on the optimization of total resources, including network bandwidth and computing resources. To minimize complexity, we propose a heuristic algorithm that achieves the optimal total resources while satisfying the availability requirements.