Anticipatory User Plane Management for 5G

The 5G user plane is bound to play a significant role in fulfilling the dynamic demand created from the heterogeneous device layer, with novel concepts introducing the flexible deployment of user plane functions and per-user traffic management. The focus in this paper lies on the dynamic control of 5G's SDNized transport network to optimize the user plane management for mobile users. For this purpose we propose the concept of Anticipatory User Plane Management for 5G, which aims at optimized, learning-based and foresighted user plane management, reducing the user plane reconfiguration latency caused by users' mobility. In particular we contribute with two different approaches that exploit the prediction of user behavior for improved post-handover procedures, i) by suitable selection of intermediate UPFs based on the anticipated user behavior, and ii) by applying a pre-configuration of the user data plane via the means of a novel UPF mode.