EPC in the Cloud
James Kempf, Kumar Balachandran · 2015
Technological and business trends are driving a deployment model of the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) where the EPC functions are deployed as services on a virtualized platform in a cloud computing infrastructure. These trends, known as network function virtualization (NFV), can be combined with software defined networking (SDN) to implement the EPC in an all software deployment in a cloud, or they can result in a split architecture where the control plane runs in a cloud and the user plane runs on hardware controlled from the cloud through a protocol such as OpenFlow. SDN also offers the potential to integrate the EPC services into the broader operator network using cross-domain orchestration. The cross-domain orchestration enables operators to quickly configure novel services involving the cloud, WAN, and mobile components and, in some cases, even allowing users to configure such services directly from a service portal.