Design and Development of Cloud Native Converged Core Solution

Truminds has successfully designed, developed and delivered Cloud-Native Converged Core solution for next generation of Wireless Networks for a leading US based Network Solution provider for ORAN and Core Networks to Service Providers across the World. As part of this engagement, Truminds architected and implemented highly scalable, Cloud native solution for SGSN functionality. The unique solution is based on 5G Service Based Architecture to achieve virtualized scalable infrastructure. The solution was greenfield designed and developed and is been interoperated for deployment in Tier-1 Service Providers with the experts team at Truminds.

Traditional 2G and 3G Core Networks were based on monolithic non-virtualized architectures, the technology has now evolved to modern system architectures in 5G leveraging microservices based cloud-native virtualized architectures, services and API based architectures with new paradigms for scalability and reliability. With 2G, 5G co-existing with their niche use cases, operators are looking for homogeneous infrastructure and architecture whether it is 2G or 5G so that deployment and operational investments are aligned. This led to the need for 2G and 3G Core Network functionality to be hosted on the converged core network platform along with 4G and 5G Core Network.

SGSN is an essential core network function that manages critical functions such as authentication, mobility management and session management for GPRS users. The solution exhibits an impressive capability to support some millions of 2G/3G subscribers and active PDP contexts using a single SGSN instance. Our strategy for ensuring the solution's robustness, high availability and scalability revolves around a micro services-based architecture. For achieving the same, SGSN was designed in line with the cloud native architecture which is proposed and used for the latest 5G and 6G services. This architectural strategy leads to stateless components, which notably diminishes dependencies and results in achieving minimal to zero latency. This user-centric design guarantees a seamless experience without any call drops.

The SGSN was designed in a bottom-up approach keeping in mind the basic architecture of the cloud native 5G architecture. The SGSN functionality was broken into logical services which can work independently to achieve a specific task but are closely knit together to provide the complete SGSN solution. As a part of this architecture there were dedicated microservices which were involved in handling the data traffic, mobility and session management and services which were involved for external communication like Gb, GTP or Iu interface. To able to achieve the scalability and make the solution highly available, in case of the service restart, these microservices were made stateless thus the architecture is centered around a central database referred to as UDSF, which serves as the repository for all user equipment (UE) information. This deliberate design choice ensures the persistence of UE data and stickiness information even during service restarts. In contrast to conventional monolithic SGSN solutions, our approach eradicates the risk of data loss in similar scenarios. Each of the SGSN microservice supports the High Available in its DNA with some microservices being deployed as N-Active while others being either N+1 or 1+1.