MMLite: A Scalable and Resource Efficient Control Plane for Next Generation Cellular Packet Core

With increase in cellular-enabled IoT devices having diverse traffic characteristics and service level objectives (SLOs), handling the control traffic in a scalable and resource-efficient manner in the cellular packet core network is critical. The traditional monolithic design of the cellular core adopted by service-providers is inflexible with respect to the diverse requirements and bursty loads of IoT devices, specifically for properties such as elasticity, customizability, and scalability. To address this key challenge, we focus on the most critical control plane component of the cellular packet core network, the Mobility Management Entity (MME). We present MMLite, a functionally decomposed and stateless MME design wherein individual control procedures are implemented as microservices and states are decoupled from their processing, thus enabling elasticity and fault tolerance. For SLO compliance, we develop a multi-level load balancing approach based on skewed consistent hashing to efficiently distribute incoming connections. We evaluate the performance benefits of MMLite over existing approaches with respect to scaling, fault tolerance, SLO compliance and resource efficiency.