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While 5G offers fast access networks and a high-performance data plane, the control plane in 5G core (5GC) still presents challenges due to inefficiencies in handling control plane operations (including session establishment, handovers and idle-to-active state-transitions) of 5G User Equipment (UE). The Service-based Interface (SBI) used for communication between 5G control plane functions introduces substantial overheads that impact latency. Typical 5GCs are supported in the cloud on containers, to support the disaggregated Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) framework of 3GPP. L25GC is a state-of-the-art 5G control plane design utilizing shared memory processing to reduce the control plane latency. However, L25GC has limitations in supporting multiple user sessions and has programming language incompatibilities with 5GC implementations, e.g., free5GC, using modern languages such as GoLang. To address these challenges, we develop L25GC+, a significant enhancement to L25GC. L25GC+ re-designs the shared-memory-based networking stack to support synchronous I/O between control plane functions. L25GC+ distinguishes different user sessions and maintains strict 3GPP compliance. L25GC+ also offers seamless integration with existing 5GC microservice implementations through equivalent SBI APIs, reducing code refactoring and porting efforts. By leveraging shared memory I/O and overcoming L25GC’s limitations, L25GC+ provides an improved solution to optimize the 5G control plane, enhancing latency, scalability, and overall user experience. We demonstrate the improved performance of L25GC+ on a 5G testbed with commercial basestations and multiple UEs.
Liu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.