Faster Response of PDU Session Establishment in the Cloud-Native Core Network of 5G and Beyond: A Redesign of Procedure and Implementation Evaluation

The 5G core network is being built on a cloud-native environment to leverage the capabilities of the cloud in the operation and management of mobile network functions (NFs), specifically User Plan Function (UPF). A new network function called User Plane Management Function (UPMF) is added to the core network to help manage all UPFs through Service Based Interface (SBI) instead of the PFCP protocol proposed in the recent design update of 5G/6G core network. UPMF allows UPF instances to be easily scaled and directly monitored by the network operators. However, several operational procedures concentrated at UPMF make things more complex. In this paper, we relocate some of the UPMF functions to the SMF, enabling the SMF to directly control the UPFs. The evaluation results demonstrate a significant reduction, approximately 13%, in the setup time of the packet data unit (PDU) due to the enhancement in our new design.