Noisy Neighbor Influence in the Data Plane of Beyond 5G Networks

2026-01-09

Consumer Communications and Networking Conference

AI Summary

This study addresses the “Noisy Neighbor” effect in B5G networks, where shared hardware leads to contention for data-plane resources among network slices, thereby compromising slice isolation and jeopardizing Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees. For the first time, the authors implement fine-grained instrumentation at the kernel level to monitor User Plane Function (UPF) performance and quantitatively assess the interference caused by high-load slices on other slices—including those with high priority. Experimental results demonstrate that such interference significantly degrades critical user experience metrics, particularly latency, exposing fundamental limitations in current slice isolation mechanisms. These findings provide empirical evidence to inform the design of future resource scheduling and isolation strategies in B5G systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis

Abstract

Virtualization and containerization enhance the modularity and scalability of mobile network architectures, facilitating customized user services and improving management and orchestration across the network. In the context of the 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G), these advancements contribute to reduced Operational Expenditures (OPEX) and enable sliced-based networking for novel applications and services. However, as beyond fifth-generation (B5G) networks aim to address the remaining challenges regarding network slice isolation, the shared underlying hardware can lead to data plane contention among slices, resulting in the Noisy Neighbor (NN) effect, which may compromise network slicing and Service-Level Agreements (SLAs). We propose a kernel-level instrumentation of the User Plane Function (UPF) to assess the impact of noisy slices on data plane processing. Our findings reveal that even prioritized slices are susceptible to degradation induced by NN, with observable effects on latency metrics pertinent to user experience.

Problem

• Noisy Neighbor
• Network Slicing
• Data Plane
• B5G Networks
• Slice Isolation

Innovation

• Noisy Neighbor
• User Plane Function (UPF)
• Network Slicing
• Kernel-level Instrumentation
• Beyond 5G