A Reliable AMF Scaling and Load Balancing Framework for 5G Core Networks

Fifth Generation (5G) networks have revolutionized modern networking practices by supporting an increasing number of connected devices and delivering improved performance through higher data rates and diverse application support. Enabling technologies are crucial to the development of evolving 5G networks to address user demand; however, the strategies they employ and the solutions they implement must account for the optimization of the network resources at hand. To this end, the work presented in this paper outlines a reliable Access and Mobility Function (AMF) scaling and load balancing framework that uses traffic class distributions and weights to determine the minimum number of AMF instances required to meet the projected demand and the relative capacity of the AMF instances to perform load balancing. The work outlined in this paper was conducted by creating a 5G core prototype using open-source emulation software. The presented results demonstrate how the resilience of the solution is controlled through the optimization problem formulation, and the load balancing module effectively balances the load across all instances in a set of AMFs.