Arsitektur 5G: Mobile Core

The main function of the Mobile Core is to provide external packet data network (i.e., Internet) connectivity to mobile subscribers, while ensuring that they are authenticated and their observed service qualities satisfy their subscription SLAs. An important aspect of the Mobile Core is that it needs to manage all subscribers’ mobility by keeping track of their last whereabouts at the granularity of the serving base station. It’s the fact that the Mobile Core is keeping track of individual subscribers—something that the Internet’s core does not do—that creates a lot of the complexity in its architecture, especially given that those subscribers are moving around.

While the aggregate functionality remains largely the same as we migrate from 4G to 5G, how that functionality is virtualized and factored into individual components changes. The 5G Mobile Core is heavily influenced by the cloud’s march toward a microservice-based (cloud native) architecture. This shift to cloud native is deeper than it might first appear, in part because it opens the door to customization and specialization. Instead of supporting just voice and broadband connectivity, the 5G Mobile Core can evolve to also support, for example, massive IoT, which has a fundamentally different latency requirement and usage pattern (i.e., many more devices connecting intermittently). This stresses—if not breaks—a one-size-fits-all approach to session management.