L²6GC: Evolving the Low-Latency Core for Future Cellular Networks

With the deployment of higher speed radio (e.g., millimeter-wave) channels, emerging cellular use cases will place a heightened emphasis on performance of the cellular core (we call it "6GC"). Based on our earlier work on designing a low-latency, high-throughput 5G cellular core, we outline a design for L26GC, a 6G cellular core preserving the current trend to disaggregate core network functions (NFs) while ensuring low-latency communication between them. L26GC leverages shared memory processing for low-latency control plane communication, providing an equivalent service to the 3rd Generation Partnership Project service-based interface and supports information exchange between NFs for each user session. L26GC offloads data plane processing to Smart Network Interface Cards, exploiting scalable, flow-level packet classifiers to expedite forwarding-rule lookups when dealing with multiple user sessions. Overall, L26GC optimizes the cellular core, improving latency, scalability, and the user’s quality of experience.