Cellular network control procedures (e.g., mobility, idle-active transition to conserve energy) directly influence data plane behavior, impacting user-experienced delay. Recognizing this control-data plane interdependence, L25GC re-architects the 5G Core (5GC) network, and its processing, to reduce latency of control plane operations and their impact on the data plane. Exploiting shared memory, L25GC eliminates message serialization and HTTP processing overheads, while being 3GPP-standards compliant. We improve data plane processing by factoring the functions to avoid control-data plane interference, and using scalable, flow-level packet classifiers for forwarding-rule lookups. Utilizing buffers at the 5GC, L25GC implements paging, and an intelligent handover scheme avoiding 3GPP's hairpin routing, and data loss caused by limited buffering at 5G base stations, reduces delay and unnecessary message processing. L25GC's integrated failure resiliency transparently recovers from failures of 5GC software network functions and hardware much faster than 3GPP's reattach recovery procedure. L25GC is built based on free5GC, an open-source kernel-based 5GC implementation. L25GC reduces event completion time by ~50% for several control plane events and improves data packet latency (due to improved control plane communication) by ~2×, during paging and handover events, compared to free5GC. L25GC's design is general, although current implementation supports a limited number of user sessions.

Virtualizing the EPC (Evolved Packet Core) in modern carrier-grade networks provides more flexible and reliable network services by decoupling dependence on the hardware. Hy- pervisor and container are two popular virtualization techniques nowadays to enable virtualization of EPC. In this paper, we compared the Open5GCore, a 5G EPC prototype, over KVM and Docker, which are representatives of the hypervisor and container techniques. Moreover, to verify how each supports new services for Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications, we also analyze the performance of two systems with the IoT and M2M traffic generated by Open5GMTC, a prototype tool for IoT/M2M platforms.

One of the most important technologies for future 5G networks is to utilize Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to virtualize the network components. NFV provides flexibility, short time to market, and low cost solution to build network services, which are important features of 5G networks. Although the idea of virtualization is just being applied to cellular networks, it has been used in the community of cloud computing. There are two main virtualization techniques, hypervisor and container. In this paper, we present our practical experience of virtualizing Open5GCore, a commercial product of SDN‐enabled Evolved Packet Core (EPC), over hypervisor and container. In addition to describing how to virtualize Open5GCore, we also present the experimental performance evaluation of the systems. Finally, some important lessons learned are provided.