CUPS (Control Plane & User Plane Separation)
5G is separated into “control plane” and “user plane” [2]. CUPS enables cost-efficient scaling through geo-distribution of essential 5G network functions and services.
Features and Benefits
- Independent Control- and user-plane scalability: Ability to independently scale control and user planes as the mobile network needs. Provides the ability to dynamically adjust the network to ever-changing demands.
- User-Plane specialization: CUPS offers the ability to leverage a single control plane for multiple user planes, some of which can be specialized for key applications. Lower equipment costs and operational costs result.
- 5G Readiness: Architectural readiness for 5G provides lower implementation costs in the future.
- Lower backhaul costs: Data termination at the edge of the network where appropriate brings substantial savings in backhaul costs.
- Traffic offload: The architecture allows for some traffic to be directed to regional and metro caches in cases such as OTT video and certain enterprise applications, improving overall customer experience.
- New use case enablement: Ability to cater to new use cases (e.g., ultra-low-latency applications, multi-gigabit per session, and mobile edge computing) provides opportunities to increase revenue.
- Multilevel CUPS offerings: Inline, co-located, remote CUPS offers successive levels of CUPS implementation, bringing maximum flexibility to match an operator's preferred pace of deployment [1].
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