Disaggregated Mobile Core for Edge City Services
Pedro Valente, Duarte Raposo, Pedro Rito, Susana Sargento · 2023
Mobile communication networks evolved staggeringly throughout the years. Current evolution (5G) needs a denser network, due to new vertical-based data-hungry applications and the increase of UEs, leading to additional costs in cellular deployment. To solve this issue and optimize the deployment of 5G, one unified network could be devised and shared by multiple operators to deploy their own networks. With a city network planned, ways to take full advantage of a neutral hosting architecture begin to be executed, which serve various services, like Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) and Internet-of-Things (IoT). This is where topics such as Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) arise, by maximizing the exploitation of the city infrastructure to reduce latency and remove the computational effort from cloud servers to the edge. This thesis focuses on developing a neutral architecture for 5G networks, with Multi-acess Edge Computing (MEC), which can be deployed in a city. In the concrete case of this thesis, this architecture will be deployed in the city of Aveiro, taking advantage of its multiple edge nodes. The disaggregation of the Core Network (CN) is a focal point of this thesis, creating a way to have a gateway closer to the edge, thus enabling MEC technologies to improve end-user and service experience. A disaggregated architecture was proposed, and extended to the city infrastructure, to accurately simulate the city environment and to attest to the city services. The test scenarios involved the comparison of a service instantiated in the cloud and in the edge, mobility scenarios with a handover through the same network to attest user plane relocation, different user plane selection, and lastly, different flow level priority assessment, to higher priority services in a full bandwidth occupation scenario. The obtained results show that the deployment of the user plane in the edge brings significant improvements, both in common user traffic and service-oriented traffic; moreover, this outlines the capabilities of this core solution as well as its limitations providing a foundation for future works.