SDN‐based failure detection and recovery mechanism for 5G core networks

Abstract

In today's Long‐Term Evolution (LTE) implementations, there is no guarantee for a given latency in the network. Furthermore, the LTE architecture does not distinguish between services that require a certain level of latency performance, from the services that do not have stringent latency requirements. The upcoming fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks is currently still being standardized to accommodate many services and applications, which have very diverse requirements. There is a plethora of already defined use cases that require very small latency, in the region of 1 ms to 20 ms. The fault recovery mechanisms in the 5G core network must support and enable the services for reaching the low latency values. In this paper, we present an optimized protocol for fast failure detection and recovery that is implemented directly in the user plane and is suitable for the 5G Evolved Packet Core. We present a protocol that uses the OpenFlow's fast‐failure mechanism for local faults and a more advanced mechanism with stateful user plane recovery protocol that is activated only in the case of remote faults. The designed algorithm was validated by simulations performed in Mininet. The simulation results prove that the proposed solution can achieve fast fault recovery times and can be implemented in the future 5G core networks.

Reliability Aware Multiple Path Installation in Software-Defined Networking

“…Panev et al [27] incarcerated the OpenFlow-supported FF and SPIDER functionalities in 5G infrastructure. This research mainly considered the recovery latency, which is a primary concern in future 5G networks.…”