When we made our 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA) tutorial some four years back, it was based on Release-15 of the 3GPP standards. All Network Functions (NFs) simply sent discovery requests to the Network Repository Function (NRF). While this works great for trials and small scale deployments it can also lead to issues as can be seen in the slide above.
In 3GPP Release-16 the Service Communication Proxy (SCP) has now been introduced to allow the Control Plane network to handle and prioritize massive numbers of requests in real time. The SCP becomes the control point that mediates all Signalling and Control Plane messages in the network core.
SCP routing directs the flow of millions of simultaneous 5G function requests and responses for network slicing, microservice instantiation or edge compute access. It also plays a critical role in optimizing floods of discovery requests to the NRF and in overall Control Plane load balancing, traffic prioritization and message management.
A detailed whitepaper on '5G Signaling and Control Plane Traffic Depends on Service Communications Proxy (SCP)' by Strategy Analytics is available on Huawei's website here. This report was a follow on from the 'Signaling — The Critical Nerve Center of 5G Networks' webinar here.
Related Posts:
- 3G4G: 5G Service Based Architecture (SBA)
- The 3G4G Blog: Interfacing HSS and UDM in 5GS with UDICOM (a.k.a NU1 / Nhss)
- The 3G4G Blog: 5G Roaming with SEPP (Security Edge Protection Proxy)
- The 3G4G Blog: Everything you need to know about 5G Security
- 3G4G: 3GPP 5G Specifications
