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 3GPP Service Based Interface (SBI), and supports information exchange between NFs for each user session. L²6GC offloads data plane processing to SmartNICs, 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.