Service-Based Architecture Evolution: Towards Enhanced Signaling in Beyond 5G/6G Networks

The 5G Core networks (5GC) are witnessing a drastic increase in signaling traffic volume due to flat Service Based Architecture (SBA) with “any to any” Network Function (NF) communication. The increased signaling, if not managed properly, may hamper the timely delivery of control messages, degrading the user's quality of experience. The underlying reason for increased 5GC signaling is high inter-dependencies between NFs that result in long, complex, and sequential system procedures. Moreover, system procedures are not optimally designed for cloud-native SBA based 5GC. This paper analyzes the system procedures for the current 5G network in order to decouple the sequential procedures into small and independent transactions. Once decoupled, the control messages can be executed in parallel, significantly reducing the procedure completion time and improving compute resource utilization. Although we decouple a few control messages in 5G registration procedure, we are limited by the design of NFs, which introduces inter- Nfcoupling. Thus, architectural changes are imperative to enable loose coupling between NFs. We present an end-to-end SBA based network for 6G and propose enhanced system procedures that allow parallel execution of control messages. We perform simulations for the modified registration procedures, demonstrating approximately 13 % and 24 % decrease in procedure completion time for 5G and 6G, respectively.