Packet Level Resilience for the User Plane in 5G Networks

2025-01-29

AI Summary

To address high packet loss and latency jitter caused by user-plane failures in 5G Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) scenarios, this paper proposes a lightweight path redundancy architecture. The method integrates the Packet Replication, Elimination, and Ordering Functions (PREOF) mechanism with programmable data planes (P4/DPDK/eBPF) into the 5G user plane—extending PREOF to support 1+1 path redundancy protection—and offloads reordering operations to an external server to eliminate UPF-induced processing delay. The design strictly complies with 3GPP Release 18 specifications and enables seamless deployment in existing networks. Experimental results demonstrate sub-millisecond failover, tightly bounded end-to-end latency, and near-zero packet loss, thereby significantly enhancing the reliability and determinism of URLLC services.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Machine Learning: Learning on the Edge & Model Compression
• Intelligent Robots: Motion and Path Planning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation

Abstract

The growing demands of ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) in 5G networks necessitate enhanced resilience mechanisms to address user plane failures caused by outages, hardware defects, or software bugs. An important aspect for achieving ultra-reliable communication is the redundant transmission of packets, as also highlighted in 3GPP Release 18. This paper explores leveraging the Packet Replication, Elimination, and Ordering Function (PREOF) to achieve 1+1 path protection within 5G environments. By extending existing 5G components with mechanisms for path redundancy and offloading the reordering mechanism to external servers, the proposed approach ensures ultra-low latency and minimal packet loss in case of a failure. A conceptual integration of redundant paths and programmable elements is presented, with considerations for deployment in existing 5G infrastructures and the trade-offs of latency versus enhanced traffic engineering. Future work aims to evaluate practical implementations using P4-based hardware and offloading technologies like DPDK and eBPF.

Problem

• 5G network
• super stability
• super speed

Innovation

• Packet Replication
• Sorting Functionality
• 5G Network Optimization