L26GC: Evolving the Low-Latency Core for Future Cellular Networks

With the deployment of higher-speed radio (e.g., millimeter wave) channels, emerging cellular use cases will place a heightened emphasis on performance of the cellular core (we call it '6GC'). Based on our earlier work on designing a low-latency, high-throughput 5G cellular core, we outline a design for L26GC , a 6G cellular core preserving the current trend to disaggregate core network functions (NFs) while ensuring low-latency communication between them. L26GC leverages shared memory processing for low-latency control plane communication, providing an equivalent service to the 3GPP Service Based Interface (SBI), and supports information exchange between NFs for each user session. L26GC offloads data plane processing to SmartNICs, exploiting scalable, flow-level packet classifiers to expedite forwarding-rule lookups when dealing with multiple user sessions. Overall, L26GC optimizes the cellular core, improving latency, scalability, and the user's quality of experience.