LOCOMOTIVE 5G Core for 6G ready Resilient and Highly Available Network Slices and SFCs

The presence of a Load Balancer (LB)s is much significant to keep up the High Availability (HA) and resilience of the scalable 5G Core (5GC). The whole system may collapse just because of inefficient LB at any NF, resulting in total disruption to the High Availability (HA) service. In this paper, we present the LOCOMOTIVE 5GC which outperforms the traditional hot standby in both HA and resilience during various dynamic conditions. LOCOMOTIVE serves 16% (at least) more user requests compared to hot standby in the control plane while handling unexpected overloaded conditions (without the failure of LB). During the failures of LB, it drops 22% lesser user requests than hot standby. With this outstanding resilience, LOCOMOTIVE even achieves 4% better availability than the hot standby in an active-active cluster configuration. To prove the feasibility of LOCOMOTIVE and to encourage further research works in the world of LBs, we developed its entire framework in a 3GPP compliant 5G test-bed system along with eXpress Data Path (XDP) and extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) framework.