Connecting people and

things in the connected world

A cloud-native architecture will be key for 5G NGC

White paper

All the new technologies enabled by 5G—the Internet of Things, artificial

intelligence, robotics, virtual reality—require a new network approach, both for
the access network and for the next generation core (NGC). The core will need
to be designed and built using all the capabilities of the cloud, and must adopt
a more agile and distributed architecture to achieve the faster service definition
and delivery required to support new socioeconomic models and behaviors.

This paper discusses the cloud-native architecture needed to deliver expanded

service capabilities, scalability, agility and new network functions, so organiza-
tions are able to move to an application-driven mode of operation to monetize
5G technologies across multiple industry verticals.

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 Contents

A new industrial revolution 3

A cloud-native core network 5
5G NR and NGC architectures 7
Network slicing 9
5G standards timeline 11
Conclusion 11
Acronyms 12

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A new industrial revolution
We are at the beginning of a revolution that is changing how we live, work
and relate to each other. According to Professor Klaus Schwab, founder
and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, the 4th Industrial
Revolution (4IR) will be characterized by a range of technologies, including
artificial intelligence (AI), cloud, robotics and virtual reality (see Figure 1).
These technologies will fuse together physical, digital and biological domains
to increase their agility and provide higher capacity, and will significantly
impact global economies and industries.
5G and the cloud will be integral parts of the 4IR, improving business
processes and driving new applications in an expanded range of markets and
sectors. These technologies will herald greater automation with augmented
and virtual reality (AR/VR) and AI, with programmability to ensure efficient and
timely execution and delivery of activities, goods and services.
Envisioned as a societal game changer that goes far beyond consuming high-
definition video, 5G technology will enable the delivery and management of
interactive, intelligent, energy-efficient and smart applications and services.
These1 will be delivered to any connected device or sensor, in any market or
sector, in near real-time and with the required reliability.
Figure 1. 4th Industrial Revolution powered by 5G

Artificial intelligence,
Social and cloud, robotics, VR
human impact 5G
PCs,
Economic flexibility automation
and social mobility IT
Mass
Industrial change production
Electricity
Mechanization
People
Steam
& Things

Driver

Enabler
1770 1870 1970 2020
1st Industrial 2nd Industrial 3rd Industrial 4th “Industrial”
revolution revolution revolution revolution

1 “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum, 2016.

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Preparation for 5G will be very different to previous technological change
because it begins with the setting of business goals that translate into
multiple services and applications to realize lucrative new business
opportunities. For this reason, there is considerable interest in 5G beyond
communications service providers (CSPs), including evolving enterprise vertical
segments such as healthcare, manufacturing, energy and transportation, as
well as government. These organizations will use 5G to manage and integrate
applications that address the challenges faced at a socioeconomic level.

5G trends
5G brings significant network improvements in capacity, connectivity,
latency and reliability. As shown in Figure 2, this will lead to an entire
range of new services that can be broadly classified into three categories.
The first is extreme mobile broadband. This takes what we are already
familiar with as a mobile data service, but significantly boosts performance
for high bandwidth needs. It will deliver new enterprise services and
applications along with the exploding consumption of multimedia and
collaborative working and social communications, such as AR/VR and video
in all its various forms and formats. These frequent, collaborative and
interactive communications occur between people as well as intelligent
devices, and generate exabytes of data each day.
Figure 2. New user demands—with extremely diverse requirements

100 Mb/s
ited experien
<10 Gb/s lim whenever needed
n

peak data rates

ce
“U

Capacity Latency
”

Extreme 10,000
mobile x more traffic
1,000,000 broadband
Devices Smart factories <1 ms
devices per km²
1.5 GB/day 1 PB/day radio latency
Ultra-low cost
for massive Massive Critical Ultra reliability
machine coms. machine machine <10 ⁵ E2E outage
communication communication
Connectivity
“ Fo

n”

ev
Reliability
tio
r

ery c
t hin g ” “In sta nt a
10 years Zero
on battery mobility
interruption
Billions of sensors Autonomous driving
connected 1ms latency
Design and architecture principles:
flexible | scalable | automated | cloud native
software centric | dynamic network slicing

The second category is massive machine communication (MMC), which

is another name for IoT. The tremendous connectivity and scalability
afforded by 5G will give rise to smart homes, smart cities and smart
factories, all containing billions of sensors that require access to a
flexible and scalable infrastructure.

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The third, which is part of MMC but more demanding, is the rise of
critical machine communications requiring very high reliability and
very low latency; for example, in public safety, autonomous vehicles
and telemedicine.

Need for a different network approach

To deliver the network requirements demanded by this broad range
of services will require the continued evolution of radio access, including
4G, unlicensed and shared spectrum technologies, and the introduction
of 5G New Radio (NR) access.
5G will require fundamental change to all aspects of network architecture.
It is more than just a radio access technology. 5G will support both fixed
and wireless access, which opens the potential for a wider range of services
and applications. The core will need to be designed and built using all the
capabilities of the cloud, and must adopt a more agile and distributed
architecture to achieve the faster service definition and delivery required
to support new socioeconomic models and behaviors.

A cloud-native core network

To meet the more demanding and varied service characteristics and
network requirements of 5G will require a fundamental change to the 5G
core architecture. The 5G core now becomes an intelligent interconnection
hub residing at the heart of the network, forming a global interconnected
fabric and acting as an anchor point for multi-access technologies. It needs
to deliver a seamless service experience across fixed and wireless access
technologies, with the advanced 5G NR being an important new radio
access technology.
Traditional packet core networks have provided mobile broadband connectivity
for smartphones, tablets and laptops, and were designed around a well-
defined call model. This call model will no longer apply because the core
network will need to support a broader range of new services and applications
with a variety of different characteristics that don’t follow a conventional
consumer call model.
The packet core is already undergoing an evolutionary change with network
functions virtualization (NFV) to support LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) services
and the first wave of IoT/machine type communications (MTC) devices.
Many organizations have already adopted NFV and virtualized their packet
cores, but this is only the first step in the transformation that is needed
to support these new services today, and moving forward, 5G services.
A cloud-native architecture is essential for a 5G NGC. As shown in Figure 3,
it builds on the network investment required today for LTE-A and IoT/MTC
services, to support the 5G NGC with expanded service capabilities, scalability,
agility and new network functions.

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Figure 3. Cloud-native core architecture delivering innovation now and on the path to 5G

Virtualized packet core Cloud-native packet core 5G NGC

• Inefficient resource utilization • Cloud native architecture • New network functions
• Inflexible capacity scaling • Multi-access connectivity • New QoE mechanisms
• Inflexible resiliency • Cellular IOT optimizations • Expanded network slicing
• Connectionless services • Evolved connectionless services

Extreme
mobile
VNF VNF VNF broadband
1 2 3

Hypervisor Massive
5G Critical
machine machine
Hardware communication communication

Cloud-native architecture to deliver massive scalability, performance, flexibility and reliability to meet the economics of IoT/MTC
and broadband evolution, and a foundation for 5G

At Nokia, we’ve gone beyond the basics by re-architecting our packet core to
be cloud-native.
The following attributes are built into the Nokia Cloud Packet Core (CPC) solution to
realize the economics of delivering diverse and demanding services and applications:
• Leveraging a common data layer to hold subscriber/session data, thereby providing
greater resiliency and flexibility
• Stateless functional software elements with state-efficient processing to achieve
greater resource efficiency and webscale capacity
• Software disaggregation that moves beyond control plane and user plane separation
• Centralized and distributed deployment architectures
• Network slicing for service management and monetization
• Cloud agile operations, allowing the automation and life cycle management of
individual CPC disaggregated software.

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5G NR and NGC architectures
5G will need to be flexible to benefit from all available spectrum options,
utilizing licensed, shared access and unlicensed spectrum. There will be a need
to balance the requirement for high data rates or low latency with massive
device densities as well as wide geographic coverage. The 5G NGC will need to
be architected to deliver the performance, massive scalability, reliability and
agility to realize the economics of delivering diverse and demanding services
and applications of the new connected world.

5G NR architecture
As shown in Figure 4, a 5G network can be deployed as a standalone solution
(SA) using 5G NR and a new 5G NGC. 5G can also be deployed as a non-
standalone (NSA) solution with dual connectivity to LTE, where the device
has two parallel radio connections: LTE and 5G. Some dual-connectivity
approaches in 3GPP Release 15 5G standards use an existing 4G Evolved
Packet Core (EPC) with enhancements to support 5G NR.
Figure 4. 5G NR deployment options

Standalone (SA) Non-standalone (NSA)

5G radio cells Directly used by 5G device Only available as a secondary carrier*
under the control of an LTE base station
Core choice 5G NGC 4G core or 5G NGC

Organization perspective Simple, high-performance overlay Leverages existing 4G deployments

5G core 4G or
5G core

4G radio

5G radio 5G radio

* In the longer term, 5G NR may also act as Master with LTE as secondary.

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5G NGC architecture
3GPP has defined a new architecture for the 5G NGC to help address
the massive scalability, low latency, high capacity, reliability and service
agility needed to deliver new services and applications. The new network
architecture enables services to be delivered over fixed, mobile or
converged networks using any available access type.
The 5G NGC will consist of the functional elements shown in Figure 5.
Some of these core functions perform similar roles as the existing EPC
while others, such as the Network Functions Repository Function (NRF),
are new.
Two models have been defined for the interaction between control plane
elements. The primary model is a cloud-aligned Service Based Architecture
(SBA) that allows reusability, flexible interconnections and service discovery
between control plane functions. A secondary alternative, more aligned to
the traditional packet core, is a point-to-point architecture with functions
interconnected with specific interfaces.
Figure 5. 3GPP Rel. 15 5G SA end-to-end architecture
NEF PCF AF Control plane
5G user plane

UDR DN

N6/SGi
Service N4
UDM SMF UPF
based
N3

AUSF AMF N2 CU: NR gNB CU: NR gNB

Xn
CU: eLTE eNB CU: eLTE eNB
N2 N1

UDSF NRF NSSF N3IWF Fs

Y2 Nwu
NR LTE
WLAN DU DU 5G RAN
AP Y1

Non-
N1 3GPP 5G UE

5G
NGC advantages
A number of architectural improvements in the 5G NGC have been adopted
in the 3GPP specifications. These improvements provide the flexibility,
scalability and agility needed to deliver 5G services and applications.
Table 1 summarizes the key differences between a 5G NGC and an EPC.

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Table 1. Comparison of 5G NGC and EPC
Feature EPC
Session and Preserve IP address forever or
service continuity use selected IP traffic offload,
i.e. “break” and then “make”
Authentication Access-dependent procedures
and session
management
QoS model QCI-based bearers linking paired
latency and reliability limits
Short packet Connection oriented only
support
Cloud-native Possible but not a necessary
solution condition: functions are
transparent to implementation
Network Need to upgrade MME, SGW and
evolution PGW each time a QoS or session
parameter is changed
Service Based Point-to-point architecture resulting
Architecture in copying common functionalities
for each reference point (Gx, Sd, St)
Access network S1 with per-UE assigned MME
core interface and assigned SGW; access-specific
S1 interface
Network slicing Single slice per UE (MME,
SGW and multiple PGWs)
5G NGC
A new Session and Service Continuity
Mode 3 allows “make” before “break”,
required for uRLLC and session
relocation
Unified architecture and procedures
for 3GPP and non-3GPP access
Flow-based QoS
Connection oriented, including
inactive mode; also connectionless
(after Release 15)
Explicit linkage to cloud-based
mechanisms; compute-storage
separation
Clean architecture with no
overlapping responsibilities
SBA in the control plane, enabling
reusability and flexibility; definition
of network functions services
Control plane (N2) and user
plane (N3) interfaces common
to all access types
End-to-end slicing with multiple
slices per UE

Network slicing
The role of network slicing is to support very diverse and extreme
requirements for latency, throughput, capacity and availability. Network
slicing will create end-to-end logical networks that have isolated properties
and are operated independently. As new services get layered onto the
network, a cloud-native core will be able to create an instance, or slice,
of an entire network virtually. The slice will be fully customized with network
resources (dedicated if needed) allocated by use case, subscriber type or
application from a common infrastructure.
As shown in Figure 6, network slicing offers an effective way to meet the
requirements of a multitude of services and applications over a common
network infrastructure, including smartphones, tablets, VR, personal health
devices, critical remote-control equipment and automotive connectivity.

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Figure 6. 5G end-to-end and policy-driven network slicing

Slicing across radio, transport,

core edge and central clouds

Autonomous
Cloud scalability
driving and efficiency
Flexibility to meet Self-service
diverse requirements Utility

Automotive

Health
Health
Smart meter

Full automation and self-optimization

Network slicing (see Figure 7) provides much-needed security mechanisms

to segregate enterprises or differing MMC-application-dedicated services
from each other. It also ensures that SLAs and QoS for that service are
maintained. Dynamic, application-based Quality of Experience (QoE)
detects and differentiates short-lived sub-service flows, which is not
possible in today’s LTE networks.
Figure 7. Flexible network slicing
One efficient cloud network Network as a service: Vertical slice Vertical and horizontal slicing

MBB Voice Media Cars Cust. A Cust. C Cust. E Cust. G

mHealth Logistics Enterprise Cust. B Cust. D Cust. F

Today’s network serving Vertical slicing for service Vertical and horizontal
all services and devices verticals, device segments slicing for MBB service
and cuctomer segments plus customer-specific
customization

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5G standards timeline
To support an early rollout of 5G standards and expedite the industry’s
desire to focus on the delivery of particular new and richer 5G services,
the standards work related to 5G has been split into two phases: 3GPP
Release 15 is Phase 1, and Release 16 is Phase 2.
As shown in Figure 8, Phase 1 includes the specifications for the overall
system architecture that encompasses the 5G NGC. Phase 1 also includes
specifications needed to support enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and
the low-latency aspects of ultra-reliable low latency communications (uRLLC).
Phase 2 includes specifications for massive IoT and further enhancements
to uRLLC services.
The first pre-5G commercially defined offers will be available in 2017. 3GPP
5G Phase 1 standards will be available in 2018. Phase 2 and full standardization
will be available in 2019, with Phase 1 being fully compatible with Phase 2.
Figure 8. 3GPP 5G standards timeline
5GTF/KT SIG 3GPP 5G Phase 1 3GPP 5G Phase 2 3GPP 5G Release 17 Optimized standard
industry specifications eMBB, FWA Massive IoT MBMS completing full
Low Latency Enhanced LLC apps 5G vision
Critical (LLC) apps >52 GHz

5G standards roadmap NSA SA

2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022

5G industry roadmap
Pre-standards First standards-based Standards-based
5G start 5G deployments 5G mass rollout

Conclusion
The advent of 5G goes much further than just faster speeds and higher
capacity for video. 5G is a revolutionary technology that will enable much
more than just broadband services from CSPs. A multitude of organizations
will be able to offer a variety of joined-up services across a range of verticals,
accessible from any device over any connectivity medium. All of this will
re-shape society and fuel industrial revolution.
5G will enable the delivery of high-bandwidth, low-latency experiences and
enhanced productivity through an adaptable network. This will require flexible
and scalable compute and processing power located in a centralized and
distributed cloud-based network architecture that forms a global connected
nervous system and a connected world. 5G will utilize policy management and
analytics for a fast, agile and personalized experience across any access type.

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At the heart of the network is a multi-access interconnection hub, which
acts as the anchor point for all wireless and fixed access types. Nokia
already supports this new reality today with its Cloud Packet Core solution.
The Nokia Cloud Packet Core solution provides software designed specifically
for the cloud. It’s not just core software that has been virtualized to run
on a server; it has been optimally designed to take full advantage of a
cloud environment. Its cloud-native capabilities and operations deliver the
performance to support increasing capacity, massive scalability, deployment
flexibility and service characteristics such as low latency. With these capabil-
ities, organizations can realize the economics of efficiently and reliably
delivering diverse and demanding consumer, residential, enterprise and
LTE-A/IoT/MTC services and applications.
Nokia’s Cloud Packet Core provides a solid foundation for organizations
to profit from today’s opportunities, and to evolve with confidence
toward a 5G NGC.
For more information visit our Nokia Cloud Packet Core web page.

Acronyms
3GPP 3rd Generation Partnership Project
4IR 4th Industrial Revolution
5G TF 5G Technical Forum
AF application function
AI artificial intelligence
AMF Access and Mobility Management Function
AP access point
AUSF Authentication Server Function
CPC Cloud Packet Core
CSP communications service provider
CU central unit
DN data network
DU distributed unit
eLTE enhanced LTE
eMBB enhanced Mobile Broadband
eNB LTE Evolved Node B
EPC Evolved Packet Core
FWA fixed wireless access

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gNB 5G New Radio base station
HLR Home Location Register
HSS Home Subscriber Server
HW hardware
IoT Internet of Things
KPI key performance indicator
LLC low latency communications
LTE long term evolution
MBB mobile broadband
MBMS Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service
MTC Machine Type Communications
mMTC massive Machine Type Communications
NB-IoT NarrowBand IoT
NEF Network Exposure Function
NGC Next Generation Core
NR New Radio
NRF Network Repository Function
PCF Policy Control Function
PGW Packet Data Network Gateway
QCI QoS Class Identifier
QoE Quality of Experience
QoS Quality of Service
RAN radio access network
SA standalone
SBA Service Based Architecture
SGi LTE interface between PGW or UPF and the data network
SGW Serving Gateway
SLA Service Level Agreement
SMF Session Management Function
UDM Unified Data Management
UDR Unified Data Repository
UDSF Unstructured Data Storage Function

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UE user equipment
UPF User Plane Function
uRLLC ultra-reliable low latency communications
VNF virtualized network function
VR virtual reality
WLAN wireless local access network
Xn Radio interconnect interface (n)
Yx Non-3GPP access interface (x)

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