Organic 6G Networks: Towards a Dependable, Flexible Control Plane

Sixth generation wireless mobile networks face many challenges. With the integration of non-terrestrial networks, wireless backhauls, multi-access edge computing, nomadic and non-public networks, the traditional assumption of a static and predictable control plane infrastructure has to be abandoned. The control plane network functions will no longer be deployed in a central location but geographically spread across the infrastructure. Different types of backhaul connections and deployment modes will mean less reliable and predictable control plane connections. This means that the core network has to be designed with these problems in mind. Running the 5G service-based architecture over a best-effort IP network is not sufficient in this regard. To address these new challenges, we propose the organic control plane. With an improved core network architecture and a robust control plane fabric, it is able to handle the heterogeneous and complex network infrastructure of the future, without compromising on performance. We implemented an organic 6G control plane, by combining our control plane fabric KIRA and our core network Open6GCore. Our evaluation using docker and Containernet shows that there is no significant performance impact, while providing improved dependability, scalability and flexibility.