Private 5G networks will soon be ubiquitous across the future-generation smart wireless access infrastructures hosting a wide range of performance-critical applications. A high-performing User Plane Function (UPF) in the data plane is critical to achieving such stringent performance goals, as it governs fast packet processing and supports several key control-plane operations. Based on a private 5G prototype implementation and analysis, it is imperative to perform dynamic resource management and orchestration at the UPF. This paper leverages Mobile Edge Cloud-Intelligent Agent (MEC-IA), a logically centralized entity that proactively distributes resources at UPF for various service types, significantly reducing the tail latency experienced by the user requests while maximizing resource utilization. Extending the MEC-IA functionality to MEC layers further incurs data plane latency reduction. Based on our extensive simulations, under skewed uRLLC traffic arrival, the MEC-IA assisted bestfit UPF-MEC scheme reduces the worst-case latency of UE requests by up to 77.8% w.r.t. baseline. Additionally, the system can increase uRLLC connectivity gain by 2.40x while obtaining 40% CapEx savings.

翻译：专用5G网络将很快在未来一代智能无线接入基础设施中无处不在，承载各种对性能要求严苛的应用。数据平面中高性能用户面功能（UPF）对于实现这些严格的性能目标至关重要，因为它负责快速数据包处理并支持多个关键控制面操作。基于专用5G原型系统的实现与分析，在UPF处进行动态资源管理与编排势在必行。本文利用移动边缘云智能代理（MEC-IA）这一逻辑集中式实体，主动为不同类型业务分配UPF资源，在最大化资源利用率的同时显著降低用户请求的尾部时延。将MEC-IA功能扩展到MEC层可进一步降低数据平面时延。基于大量仿真实验，在非均匀uRLLC流量到达场景下，MEC-IA辅助的最佳适配UPF-MEC方案相比基线方案将用户设备请求的最坏情况时延降低最高77.8%。此外，该方案可使uRLLC连接增益提升2.40倍，同时节省40%的资本支出。