Designing Stateless Control-Plane for Next-Generation Telecom Networks
Savita Sthawarmath, Éric Renault, Thierry Lejkin · 2022
Control-plane operations are of significant importance in enabling telecom service delivery. The promise of low latency data delivery by 5G networks has encouraged machine-type communication in addition to existing human-type service consumption. This change has greatly challenged the telecom operators to maintain a highly scalable and resilient telecom core to deal with the potentially volatile nature of traffic demand. To that end, sofwarization and virtualization of core network entities have extensively helped to achieve a high degree of flexibility and scalability. Complementing this, separating the computing from the storage as a second degree of decoupling is required to make network functions highly resilient. In this work, we propose the stateless model for control-plane functions to make core network transparent to failures. In addition to achieving resiliency, we present the importance of stateless control-plane functions in reducing overall latency mainly induced during handover procedure execution.