5G Core

The easiest way to understand 5GC is to imagine the key organs in your body. Your brain is the intelligence center, processing information collected by your nervous system, making decisions and coordinating actions throughout your body, and working with your heart to pump blood around your body in response to its needs.

Similarly, the 5GC is the hub that manages all the data traffic and storage, user services and advanced functionalities in a 5G network, controlling the flow of user traffic around the network. Just like the brain receives information from your senses, the 5GC handles data brought in from the network infrastructure – the 5G New Radio (NR) and Radio Access Network (RAN), processing requests from connected devices like your smartphone or smartwatch. It then routes all the data traffic to the requested internet service, enterprise service or person in the optimal way.

5G non-standalone (NSA) leverages existing 4G LTE core networks to deliver higher speeds by combining 5G New Radio (NR) with the 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC), allowing for a faster initial rollout of 5G services.

However, it’s with 5G standalone (SA) that the full potential of 5G can be realized. 5G SA uses a fully cloud-native 5GC network to enable ultra-low latency, support advanced network slicing functions and facilitate a broader range of innovative use cases that address the growing needs of businesses and consumers. Adding additional capacity directly onto a 5G SA network can also significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to expanding existing 4G networks.

Learn more about 5G SA vs NSA

The data layer stores and manages critical subscriber and network application data, such as user profiles, authentication information and network policies. Subscriber data management (SDM) is of vital importance, as today’s mobile networks manage millions of subscriber-related data transactions every second – data which need to be collected, stored, provisioned and made accessible on demand to network functions, applications, or other services.

The control plane is responsible for managing access, signaling, sessions, mobility and policies across the network. It includes functions like the dynamic control of network resources and slice selection, authentication and mobility management and the exposure of network capabilities and management of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

The user plane handles the actual user data traffic, providing high throughput for services like mobile broadband (MBB), and with the right solutions, can help ensure the efficient utilization of physical resources, even as traffic and demand grow.