An Innovative EPC with Not Only Stack for beyond 5G Mobile Networks

摘要

The explosive growth of user traffic brings a great pressure on evolved packet core (EPC) caused by huge numbers of emerging mobile intelligent applications. An EPC with good flexibility and scalability is required. In this paper, we proposed a virtualized and programmable EPC architecture (NOS-EPC) by leveraging the framework of not only stack (NOS) framework in order to satisfy the stringent requirements in beyond 5G (B5G) network. The global controller (GC) and the global network view (GNV) are established for the NOS-EPC. The control plane (C-Plane), the user plane (U-Plane) and the management plane (M-Plane) for the NOS-EPC, which are mutual and decoupled, are realized. NS3 based simulations are performed to verify the performance of the NOS-EPC. We compare the proposed NOS-EPC with different LTE solutions, including the LTE/EPC and software- defined network based EPC (SDN- EPC). The results show that the NOS-EPC can efficiently improve the EPC performance on the aspects of procedure duration and signaling overheads.