New Vision for 5G Backbone Network Architecture

Abstract

Today’s routing infrastructure uses BGP for interdomain routing, which suffers from several well-known issues - slow convergence, lack of transparency, limited control in routing, and limited scalability for handling the massive IPv6 address space. As a result, it cannot meet the stringent requirements 5G ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), which has been designed for latency-critical real-time applications such as tele robotics and augmented reality, and must scale up to support millions of IoT devices. To address these shortcomings of today’s routing infrastructure, we propose a four layer hierarchical network architecture, that associates a real (geographical) address with each IP address. The real address has four parts - country, state, district, and AS - that correspond to the four layers of routing hierarchy, and is used for inter-domain routing; the IP address is used for routing only within an AS. The hierarchical routing using geographical addresses enables quick convergence, fewer number of routing hops, and a very small number of forwarding rules in each router. Each network layer can further be sliced for the three broad categories of 5G users i.e mBBC, MTC and uRLLC. As deploying a new architecture across the globe is challenging, we discuss how it can be incrementally deployed one country at a time, exploiting existing infrastructure for international routing.