FlexCore: Leveraging XDP-SCTP for Scalable and Resilient Network Slice Service in Future 5G Core

Abstract

The control plane of 5G Core (5GC) is typically shared among multiple dependent network slices of the data plane. But as the number of dependent slices and services on the common and shared control plane increases, its resilience threat also increases. This paper proposes FlexCore: a 5GC that is not only flexible and scalable but also resilient to cater to various service requirements on both stateful and stateless architectures of 5GC. FlexCore is built with an eXpress Data Path (XDP) and extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) based SCTP load balancer hooked at the entry point of the 3GPP compliant 5GC control plane, and a set of micro-AMF instances to serve the user requests. Precisely, the FlexCore is fabricated to honor the variety of incoming user requests on the control plane as per the service requirements, like, per slice, per user, or per control procedure of users too. Experiments on a 3GPP compliant 5G testbed show that FlexCore can provide average latency reduction of up to 14% and 79% on stateful and stateless architectures, respectively, and up to 63% latency reduction for latency-critical slices on the slice-aware architecture.