An Innovative EPC Architecture based on Not Only Stack for beyond 5G Mobile Networks

The traditional long-term evolved (LTE) network architecture faces major challenges due to the rapid development of mobile intelligent applications. Evolved packet core (EPC) network, as the core network of the LTE system, faces the same problem as well. In this paper, we propose an innovative EPC architecture, i.e., Not only stack (NOS)-EPC, in which we redesign the control paradigm based on the NOS framework. NOS-EPC contains the user plane (U-plane), the control plane (C-plane), the management plane (M-plane), and the global network view (GNV). By using NOS framework, distributed control paradigm is turned into a centralized manner which simplifies the signaling flows, reducing the procedure latency and overheads. The operation of NOS-EPC is expounded by four main EMM procedures, including initial attachment, service request, handover, and detachment. Through comparison to LTE/EPC, and software-defined networking(SDN)-EPC, we elaborate the advantages of NOS-EPC on operating expense (OPEX), scalability, flexibility, signaling overheads, and user traffic transmission capability. The simulation results confirm that the proposed NOS-EPC takes advantages on the procedure latency and signalling overheads compared to the other EPC solutions, e.g., LTE/EPC and SDN-EPC.