The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile core network is designed as a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) hosted on Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. This creates a growing demand for general-purpose compute resources as 5G deployments continue to expand. Given their elastic infrastructure, cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are attractive platforms to address this need. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the control and user plane Quality of Service (QoS) performance associated with deploying the 5G core on top of a public cloud. To account for both software and communication costs, we build a 5G testbed using open-source components spanning multiple locations within AWS. We present an operational breakdown of the performance overhead for various 5G use cases using different core deployment strategies. Our results indicate that moving specific VNFs into edge regions reduces the latency overhead for key 5G operations. Furthermore, we instantiated multiple user plane connections between availability zones and edge regions with different traffic loads. We observed that the deterioration of connection quality varies depending on traffic loads and is use case specific. Ultimately, our findings provide new insights for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) for optimal placements of their 5G core functions.

翻译：第五代（5G）移动核心网设计为一组运行在商用现成（COTS）硬件上的虚拟网络功能（VNF）。随着5G部署规模的持续扩大，对通用计算资源的需求日益增长。得益于其弹性基础设施，亚马逊云服务（AWS）等云服务成为满足此需求的理想平台。因此，理解在公有云上部署5G核心网时控制面与用户面的服务质量（QoS）性能至关重要。为同时考虑软件与通信开销，我们利用开源组件在AWS多个区域构建了5G测试平台。通过采用不同的核心网部署策略，我们对各类5G用例的性能开销进行了运行分解。结果表明，将特定VNF迁移至边缘区域可降低关键5G操作的延迟开销。此外，我们在可用区与边缘区域之间建立了多条用户面连接，并设置了不同的流量负载。我们观察到连接质量的恶化程度因流量负载而异，且与具体用例相关。最终，我们的研究结果为移动虚拟网络运营商（MVNO）优化其5G核心网功能部署位置提供了新见解。