Optimal Placement of User Plane Functions in 5G Networks

Because of developments in society and technology, new services and use cases have emerged, such as vehicle-to-everything communication and smart manufacturing. Some of these services have stringent requirements in terms of reliability, bandwidth, and network response time and to meet them, deploying network functions (NFs) closer to users is necessary. Doing so will lead to an increase in costs and the number of NFs. Under such circumstances, the use of optimization strategies for the placement of NFs is crucial to offer Quality of Service (QoS) in a cost-effective manner. In this vein, this paper addresses the User Plane Functions Placement (UPFP) problem in 5G networks. The UPFP is modeled as a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem aimed at determining the optimal number and location of User Plane Functions (UPFs). Two optimization models are proposed that considered various parameters, such as latency, reliability and user mobility. To evaluate their performance, two services under the Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) category were selected. The acquired results showcase the effectiveness of our solutions.