An Architecture for Control Plane Slicing in Beyond 5G Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new control plane architecture for beyond 5G networks that enhances modularity, scalability, and slice isolation, addressing limitations of the current 5G system.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control plane architecture that improves slicing capabilities and control plane isolation in beyond 5G networks.

Findings

Enhanced control plane modularity and scalability

Improved slice isolation in the control plane

Confirmed performance improvements over existing 5G architecture

Abstract

To accommodate various use cases with differing characteristics, the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communications system intends to utilize network slicing. Network slicing enables the creation of multiple logical networks over a shared physical network infrastructure. While the problems such as resource allocation for multiple slices in mobile networks have been explored in considerable detail in the existing literature, the suitability of the existing mobile network architecture to support network slicing has not been analysed adequately. We think the existing 5G System (5GS) architecture suffers from certain limitations, such as a lack of slice isolation in its control plane. This work focuses on the future evolution of the existing 5GS architecture from a slicing perspective, especially that of its control plane, addressing some of the limitations of the existing 5GS architecture. We propose a new network architecture which enables efficient slicing in beyond 5G networks. The proposed architecture results in enhanced modularity and scalability of the control plane in sliced mobile networks. In addition, it also brings slice isolation to the control plane, which is not feasible in the existing 5G system. We also present a performance evaluation that confirms the improved performance and scalability of the proposed system viz a viz the existing 5G system.