Island-Ready Communication Networks: Connectivity Monitoring and State Synchronization for 5G Crisis Connectivity at the Edge

Abstract

Island-ready 5G deployments provide edge connectivity for isolated regions in crisis scenarios by switching to island operation when they are cut off from the global Internet. This work addresses open research challenges that hinder the practical realization of island readiness, with a focus on the required state synchronization and connectivity monitoring functionality. As a proof of concept and for performance evaluation, we integrate our solutions in open-source projects and emulate a country-wide 5G communication network with real-world cellular traffic. Our evaluation studies the switching latency of transitions to island operation, showing that most of the transition delay stems from the access network reconfiguration. We study the synchronization overhead of a highly distributed core network, finding that the synchronization traffic grows faster than linearly with the number of 5G cores, reaching peak synchronization data rates of 9.36MB/s for a deployment of 50 cores.