Experimental Verification of Segment Routing Methods in 5G+ Mobile Transport Networks

The development of the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks brings a digital transformation. However, the use of legacy technologies brings new challenges/issues, especially in terms of supporting new services that 5G networks enable. One of them is network slicing, which is regulated by the international organization 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). However, the available standards and technical specifications mostly deal just with the implementation of network slicing into the Radio Access Network (RAN) and Core parts but leaving aside the transport network. To bridge this gap, this work deals with the network slicing technique for the transport part using Segment Routing (SR) technology. Furthermore, it discusses other possible solutions for ensuring network slicing in the transport part of mobile network, the issues of the current state of the fourth generation (4G) transport network, and the necessary changes to ensure the requirements for 5G+ networks. Further, it presents the results of experimental measurements of SR methods for IPv4. For these simulations, we first created a default configuration simulating a 4G architecture containing standard Internal Gateway Protocol (IGP) protocols, which was then used for comparison. Subsequently, we focused in more detail on both possible path options for Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE) - Explicit and Dynamic. The main observed parameter was delay related to the individual slices.