A Scalable and Fault-Tolerant 5G Core on Kubernetes

The 5G core is an important part of a 5G network, and with the exponential growth of connected devices and dynamic traffic conditions, it is essential for the 5G core to be scalable and fault-tolerant. This requirement is even more important with the softwarization of the packet core and cloud-based deployments. This paper presents a comparison of design choices when building a scalable and fault-tolerant 5G core on a Kubernetes-orchestrated cloud platform. Prior work in this direction does not fully explore all design choices, or is not compliant with 3GPP standards. In contrast, we start with a 3GPP-compliant production-grade 5G core, and build multiple variants of cloud-native 5G core components. We leverage Kubernetes’ automatic failover, and auto-scaling capabilities in different ways to make the 5G core scalable and fault-tolerant. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the scalability and resilience of various design choices, and to quantify the overheads of cloud deployments. Our work exposes tradeoffs between performance and fault tolerance, and provides insights on how best to design a scalable and fault-tolerant 5G core on Kubernetes.