Improving Reliability for Cloud-Native 5G and Beyond Using Network Coding

Retransmission at the Radio Link Control (RLC) layer is the de-facto technique to overcome packet loss at the cost of increased transmission delay in 5G systems. Softwarization of the 5G core and its adoption of cloud-native architecture allows for bringing in more advanced error correction techniques, such as Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC), into 5G systems. RLNC reduces delay and packet loss by proactively generating and sending combinations of original packets at the cost of more computing. We develop RLNC as a plug-in software in OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G CN and deploy it. Evaluation results in a practical testbed show that RLNC has decreased packet loss while Introducing a low delay.