Abstract:
The growing demands of ultra-reliable and lowlatency
communication (URLLC) in 5G networks necessitate
enhanced resilience mechanisms to address user plane failures
caused by outages, hardware defects, or software bugs. An
important aspect for achieving ultra-reliable communication is
the redundant transmission of packets, as also highlighted in
3GPP Release 18. This paper explores leveraging the Packet
Replication, Elimination, and Ordering Function (PREOF) to
achieve 1+1 path protection within private 5G environments. By
extending existing 5G components with mechanisms for packet
level redundancy and offloading the reordering mechanism to
external servers, the proposed approach ensures minimal packet
loss in case of a failure. A conceptual integration of redundant
paths and programmable elements is presented, with considerations
for deployment in existing 5G infrastructures and the
trade-offs of latency versus enhanced traffic engineering. Future
work aims to evaluate practical implementations using an open
source 5G core, P4-based hardware and offloading technologies
like DPDK and eBPF.
