A Dynamic UPF Fault Recovery Mechanism for Enhanced Resilience in 5G Core Networks
Ensuring fault tolerance in the User Plane Function is essential to maintain service continuity in 5G networks, particularly as latency-sensitive applications become more prevalent. This paper presents a novel mechanism for dynamic UPF failure detection and recovery within an OpenAirInterface-based 5G core environment. The approach introduces an application-layer session restoration mechanism to ensure service continuity and minimize disruptions during UPF failures. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism reduces UPF downtime while maintaining low packet loss and enabling rapid service recovery. In tests with TCP and UDP traffic, connectivity was restored within a few seconds, minimizing service degradation. Furthermore, our failure-aware UPF selection mechanism improves long-term system resilience by considering recent failure history. The results highlight the effectiveness of our lightweight framework in improving the overall reliability of 5G networks, making it a valuable contribution to network robustness.