Smart living applications represent a significant group of 5G vertical use cases. For the most part, these use cases require mobile network connectivity and service high-availability. Simply put, two essential requirements for these applications are short connection time and uninterrupted user data service. Coupled with the expectation of supporting billions of connected devices, these requirements can be achieved by exploiting New Generation Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) architectures. One such emerging architecture is Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN), whose Next Generation NodeB (gNB) functions are physically decoupled into distinct entities, such as Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU). The CUs are connected to 5G Core Network (CN) and are likely to be virtualized and distributed across multiple (micro and macro) data centers. The virtualized CUs (vCUs) are further decoupled into virtualized CU Control-Plane (vCU-CP) and virtualized CU User-Plane (vCU-UP) to increase flexibility and scalability. As these 5G RAN entities are virtualized, various resiliency schemes, such as container migration, must be considered to overcome possible congestion in or malfunction of the hosting server.In this paper, two distinct cloud-native RAN resiliency scenarios are evaluated while live-migrating gNB-vCU-CP with the objective of maintaining User Equipment (UE) connection time short and user data service uninterrupted in support of smart living and other advanced applications.

The 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture provides a split option, whereby a gNodeB Central Unit (gNB-CU) is connected to one or more gNB-Distributed Units (gNB- DUs). The CU is in turn connected to the 5G Core Network (CN) and its functions can be virtualized through software containers. This demonstration showcases live migration of a containerized Central Unit (CU) component in a Cloud-native 5G network without loss of service. In terms of resiliency, virtual function live migration can circumvent the failure of the server hosting the gNB-virtualized CU (gNB-vCU) that would otherwise cause an interruption of user-plane (UP) traffic and disconnection of User Equipment (UE). The proposed gNB-vCU container live migration technique reduces the end-user service temporary downtime by 50% when compared to the traditional backup/restore option.