Virtualization and containerization enhance the modularity and scalability of mobile network architectures, facilitating customized user services and improving management and orchestration across the network. In the context of the 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G), these advancements contribute to reduced Operational Expenditures (OPEX) and enable sliced-based networking for novel applications and services. However, as beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks aim to address the remaining challenges regarding network slice isolation, the shared underlying hardware can lead to data plane contention among slices, resulting in the Noisy Neighbor (NN) effect, which may compromise network slicing and Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose a kernel-level instrumentation of the User Plane Function (UPF) to assess the impact of noisy slices on data plane processing. Our findings reveal that even prioritized slices are susceptible to degradation induced by NN, with observable effects on latency metrics pertinent to user experience.

翻译：虚拟化与容器化技术增强了移动网络架构的模块化与可扩展性，促进了定制化用户服务的实现，并提升了全网的管理与编排能力。在第五代移动通信网络（5G）的背景下，这些进步有助于降低运营支出（OPEX），并支持基于网络切片的新型应用与服务。然而，随着超越第五代（B5G）网络致力于解决网络切片隔离方面的遗留挑战，共享的底层硬件可能导致切片间在数据平面产生资源争用，从而引发噪声邻居效应，这可能损害网络切片及服务等级协议（SLA）的保障。我们提出一种在用户面功能（UPF）内核层进行插装的方法，以评估噪声切片对数据平面处理的影响。我们的研究结果表明，即使是高优先级的切片也容易受到噪声邻居导致的性能劣化，这种影响在与用户体验相关的时延指标上具有可观测性。