Explainable Performance Analysis of Open-Source 5G Core Network Implementations Via Observability

The advent of fifth-generation mobile networks (5G) has brought transformative improvements in data transfer speeds, latency reduction, and device connectivity, enabled by the softwarization, virtualization, and disaggregation of network functions. Open-source projects have been instrumental in facilitating software-driven 5G deployments on standard hardware, accelerating the development of private 5G networks, test environments, and advancing research and innovation in the domain. Despite these advancements, the current maturity of open-source solutions remains inadequate for high-performance, large-scale 5G deployments. Existing 5G performance testing approaches primarily adopt a black-box perspective, which fails to capture the intricate interactions among core 5G components, thereby hindering the identification of performance bottlenecks. Additionally, testing is often limited to small-scale environments, and publicly available datasets from real-world deployments are scarce. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces an observability-driven methodology for testing $5G$ core network performance, offering deeper insights into the internal interactions of network components. We contribute to research and innovation in 5G and beyond field by (i) enabling the simulation of varying user arrival rates, (ii) releasing a public dataset capturing data of 5G core components interactions, logs, and performance metrics, and (iii) providing a comparative analysis of two popular open-source 5G core implementations based on our observability-oriented methodology.