CoreKube: An Efficient, Autoscaling and Resilient Mobile Core System

Given the central role mobile core plays in supporting mobile network operations, the efficiency, cost-effective dynamic scalability and resilience of the core control plane are paramount. Achieving these goals, however, presents two main challenges: (i) decoupling core network state from processing; (ii) decoupling control plane processing in the core from its interface to the radio access network (RAN). To overcome them, we present CoreKube, a novel message focused and cloud-native mobile core system design, which features truly stateless workers (processing units) that interface with a common database (to hold the core network state) and with the RAN through a frontend. The fully stateless and generic nature of the workers to process any control plane message enables efficient message handling. Orchestration of containerized CoreKube components using Kubernetes, allows leveraging the latter’s autoscaling and self-healing properties. We develop 4G and 5G standard-compliant CoreKube implementations, exploiting the agile development methodology enabled by CoreKube’s message focused design. Results from our extensive experimental evaluations over the Powder platform relative to prior art show that CoreKube efficiently processes control plane messages, scales dynamically while using minimal compute resources and recovers seamlessly from failures.