Enabling Service-Oriented Principles for the User Plane of Mobile Telecommunication Networks

This paper presents the architectural considerations of integrating a non-IP-based service routing solution, Name-Based Routing, to the 5G user plane. While entirely preserving the control plane procedures on the terminal, the carefully crafted considerations herein argue for a new Session Management Function functionality and the transitioning of the N4 interface to become a Service-Based Interface, i.e. Nupf. Furthermore, this paper presents User Plane Function provisioning procedures based on Software-Defined Networks principles mitigating the need for any manual management procedures and enabling cloud-native orchestration procedures for all 5G Core Network Functions.