Enabling Cloud-Native Observability for White-Box Performance Analysis of the 5G Core

The fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) has introduced significant advancements in data transfer rates, latency, and device density, empowered by softwarization, virtualization, and disaggregation of network functions. Open-source initiatives have played a crucial role in enabling software-based 5G network deployments on commodity hardware, driving the growth of private 5G networks and testbeds, and fostering research and innovation in the field. However, the maturity level of such open-source technologies is still insufficient for highly performant large-scale deployments. Current 5G performance testing methodologies rely predominantly on a black-box approach, which overlooks the complexity of interactions between 5G core components, limiting the ability to explain performance bottlenecks. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a new observability-driven methodology for 5G core network performance testing, which improves visibility into internal component interactions. We contribute to research and innovation in 5G and beyond field by (i) implementing testing workloads that are able to simulate varying user arrival rates and (ii) integrate a set of cloud-native observability tools to allow white-box performance evaluation of the 5G core.