5GC-Bench: A Framework for Stress-Testing and Benchmarking 5G Core VNFs

2025-09-22

AI Summary

Cloud-native decoupling in 5G core networks enhances flexibility but exacerbates challenges in jointly evaluating control-plane multi-VNF coordination and user-plane high-load traffic. Existing benchmarking tools typically conduct isolated tests using synthetic workloads and lack fine-grained resource visibility. Method: We propose the first open-source framework enabling joint stress testing of signaling and data traffic, built upon a real 5G testbed and OpenAirInterface 5GC. It supports control-plane–user-plane co-simulation, cross-VNF dependency modeling, service-chain end-to-end analysis, and full-stack resource monitoring. Contribution/Results: The framework innovatively integrates bottleneck identification under realistic workloads with automated capacity planning recommendations. Experimental evaluation demonstrates its ability to accurately pinpoint critical resource constraints in typical deployments and significantly improves detection of performance bottlenecks and cross-network-element interaction issues under complex traffic conditions.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

The disaggregated, cloud-native design of the 5G Core (5GC) enables flexibility and scalability but introduces significant challenges. Control-plane procedures involve complex interactions across multiple Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), while the user plane must sustain diverse and resource-intensive traffic. Existing tools often benchmark these dimensions in isolation, rely on synthetic workloads, or lack visibility into fine-grained resource usage. This paper presents 5GC-Bench, a modular framework for stress-testing the 5GC under realistic workloads. 5GC-Bench jointly emulates signaling and service traffic, supporting both VNF profiling and end-to-end service-chain analysis. By characterizing bottlenecks and resource demands, it provides actionable insights for capacity planning and performance optimization. We integrated 5GC-Bench with the OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5GC and deployed it on a real 5G testbed, demonstrating its ability to uncover resource constraints and expose cross-VNF dependencies under scenarios that mirror operational 5G deployments. To foster reproducibility and further research, we release publicly all the artifacts.

Problem

• Stress-testing 5G Core VNFs under realistic workloads and traffic conditions
• Benchmarking complex control-plane interactions across multiple Virtual Network Functions
• Analyzing fine-grained resource usage and cross-VNF dependencies in 5GC

Innovation

• Modular framework for stress-testing 5G Core
• Jointly emulates signaling and service traffic
• Provides profiling and end-to-end service-chain analysis