Evaluation of 5G Core Slicing on User Plane Function

Abstract

Network slicing is one of the most important features in 5G which enables a large variety of services with diverse performance requirements by network virtualization. Traditionally, the network can be viewed as a one-size-fits-all slice and its services are bundled with proprietary hardware supported by telecom equipment providers. Now with the network virtualization technology in 5G, open networking software can be deployed flexibly on commodity hardware to offer a multi-slice network where each slice can offer a different set of network services. In this research, we propose a multi-slice 5G core architecture by provisioning its User Plane Functions (UPFs) with different QoS requirements. We compare the performance of such a multi-slice system with that of one-size-fits-all single slice architecture under the same resource assignment. Our research objective is to compare the performance of a network slicing architecture with that of a “one-size-fits-all” architecture and validate that the former can achieve better performance with the same underlying infrastructure. The results validate that our proposed system can achieve better performance by slicing one UPF into three with proper resource allocation.