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.

This paper focuses on the need for emerging domains such as serverless and in-network computing, where applications are often hosted on virtualized compute instances (e.g., containers and unikernels), to have applications startup as quickly as possible. We provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of containers and unikernels with regard to the startup time. We analyze these in-depth and identify the key components and their impact under scale on the startup latency. We study how startup time scales as we launch multiple instances concurrently. We study the contribution of popular Container Networking Interfaces (CNIs), to the startup time.

With the rapid increase in the number of users and changing pattern of network usage, cellular networks will continue to be challenged meeting bandwidth and latency requirements. A significant contributor to latency and overhead is cellular network's complex control-plane. We propose CleanG, a new packet core architecture and significantly more efficient control-plane protocol, that exploits the capabilities of modern-day Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms. CleanG is a single component NFV-based architecture. With the elastic scalability offered by NFV, the data and control sub-components of the core can scale, adapting to workload demand. CleanG eliminates the use of GTP tunnels for data packets and the associated complex protocol for coordination across multiple, distributed components for setting up and managing them. We carefully examine the use of each protocol message exchange (and the component fields of those messages) in developing a substantially simplified protocol, while retaining similar essential functionality for security, mobility, and air-interface resource management. We have implemented CleanG on the OpenNetVM platform and perform an apples-to-apples comparison with the existing 3GPP LTE architecture and an architecture that separates the control and user plane (the CUPS-based architecture like the 5G architecture). Measurements on our testbed show that CleanG substantially reduces both control and data plane latency, and significantly increases system capacity.