A Software-Defined Networking Solution for Interconnecting Network Functions in Service-Based Architectures

Mobile core networks handle critical control functions for delivering services in modern cellular networks. Traditional point-to-point architectures, where network functions are directly connected through standardized interfaces, are being substituted by service-based architectures (SBAs), where cor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE access 2022, Vol.10, p.19905-19916
Main Authors: Fondo-Ferreiro, Pablo, Gil-Castineira, Felipe, Gonzalez-Castano, Francisco Javier, Candal-Ventureira, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
3GPP
5G mobile communication
Cellular communication
Computer architecture
core network (CN)
Infrastructure
Microservice architectures
Noise measurement
Proposals
Routing
service communication proxy (SCP)
service-based architecture (SBA)
Software-defined networking
Software-defined networking (SDN)
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Summary:Mobile core networks handle critical control functions for delivering services in modern cellular networks. Traditional point-to-point architectures, where network functions are directly connected through standardized interfaces, are being substituted by service-based architectures (SBAs), where core functionalities are finer-grained microservices decoupled from the underlying infrastructure. In this way, network functions and services can be distributed, with scaling and fail-over mechanisms, and can be dynamically deployed, updated, or removed to support slicing. A myriad of network functions can be deployed or removed according to traffic flows, thereby increasing the complexity of connection management. In this context, 3GPP Release 16 defines the service communication proxy (SCP) as a unified communication interface for a set of network functions. In this paper, we propose a novel software-defined networking (SDN)-based solution with the same role for a service mesh architecture where network functions can be deployed anywhere in the infrastructure. We demonstrated its efficiency in comparison with alternative architectures.
ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3152197