Abstract

Within a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) fifth generation (5G) environment, a number of user plane challenges may arise. For example, in order to achieve minimum latency in a 5G environment, it is critical to have the same User Plane Function (UPF) for both a Serving Gateway (SGW) control plane (SGW-C) function and a packet data network (PDN) Gateway (PGW) control plane (PGW-C) function call leg. Additionally, in order to handle the scale of user plane traffic in a 5G environment, the user planes must be as efficient and as optimized as possible regarding data packet processing while at the same time the control plane also needs to establish a mobile session as quickly as possible with minimum latency. To address the type of challenges that were described above, various solutions are provided herein through several techniques. A first technique, among other things, ensures a configuration-agnostic UPF selection (which does not depend upon static configuration in multiple places) which may be performed dynamically based on UPF profiles. A second technique, among other things, not only improves upon control path session setup time by removing unwanted delays every time a handover is processed, but also uplifts the UPF processing capacity by converging different legs of the same call at the same node. Features such as these are critically important to make the 5G story a success.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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