A Way Forward for Accommodating NFV in 3GPP 5G Systems

Recently, the specifications for 5G system architecture and procedures including TS 23.501 and 23.502 are being developed by 3GPP. In the specifications, one of key principles and concept is to separate the user plane (UP) functions from the control plane (CP) functions, allowing independent scalability, evolution and flexible deployments and modularize the functions design to enable flexible and efficient network slicing. Therefore, a lot of new network functions (NFs) for 5G system has been newly discussed and specified, such as AMF, SMF, UPF, NRF, NEF, etc. In this regard, it is important to see that the NFs can be implemented as a virtualized network functions (VNF) instantiated on a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform. It is obviously understood that NFV can offer a more efficient way to design, deploy and manage 3GPP network service, since NFV relocates 3GPP 5G NFs from dedicated hardware to generic servers and virtualization infrastructure. However, it is not clearly investigated yet regarding NFV impacts on 3GPP 5G systems from standards perspective. In this paper, we discuss a way forward for accommodating NFV in 3GPP 5G system including distributed NFVs, MEC and NFV integration, and MANO support in 3GPP management system, etc.