SimpleCore: A connectionless, best effort, no-mobility-supporting 5G core architecture

This paper proposes a highly simplistic 5G core network design. Instead of providing mobility support and Quality-of-Service for all traffic as in the 4G core network EPC, the default service of 5G should be connectionless, best effort and without support for node mobility. This is based on the observation that applications like video streaming or web surfing that create the bulk of the traffic in mobile networks can handle node mobility at the application layer and traverse the best effort Internet anyway. This paper provides the architecture for such a simplified 5G core network, demonstrates the feasibility of our proposal through experiments on an Android smartphone and outlines the many open research challenges of this fundamentally different approach to mobile networking.