arXiv subjects

Tolga O. Atalay

Publications and source records attributed to Tolga O. Atalay.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Survey on Cloud-Based 6G Deployments: Current Solutions, Future Directions and Open Challenges

The next generation of cellular networks is designed to provide ubiquitous connectivity to a wide range of devices. As Telecommunication Service Providers (TSPs) increasingly collaborate with public cloud providers to deploy 5G and beyond networks, a fundamental shift is underway, from hardware-bound Physical Network Functions (PNFs) to cloud-native, containerized deployments managed through platforms like Kubernetes. While this transition promises greater scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency, it also introduces a complex set of technical and operational challenges that must be thoroughly understood before large-scale cellular deployments can take place in cloud environments. In this survey, we present a structured taxonomy that categorizes the design space of cloud-based cellular deployments across four dimensions: deployment architecture, resource management and orchestration, multi-tenancy and isolation, and economic and ownership models. Using this taxonomy as a foundation, we critically analyze six key investigation areas, security and privacy, scalability and elasticity, performance and latency, cost optimization, resilience and fault management, and compliance and sovereignty, examining each through a cloud-native lens. To benchmark the state of industry adoption, we examine the deployment strategies of leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Finally, we identify emerging trends such as AI-driven orchestration, quantum-safe protocols for virtualized network functions, and serverless networking for 6G, while articulating the open challenges that remain in realizing robust, scalable cloud-based cellular networks.

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arXiv2025

SlicePilot: Demystifying Network Slice Placement in Heterogeneous Cloud Infrastructures

Cellular networks are comprised of software-based entities, with main functions encapsulated as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) deployed on Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. As a key enabler of 5G, network slicing offers logically isolated Quality of Service (QoS) for diverse use cases. With the transition to cloud-native infrastructures, optimizing network slice placement across multi-cloud environments remains challenging due to heterogeneous resource capabilities and varying slice-specific demands. This paper presents SlicePilot, a modular framework that enables autonomous and near-optimal VNF placement using a disaggregated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) approach. SlicePilot collects real-world traffic profiles to estimate resource needs for each slice type. These estimates guide a MARL-based scheduler that minimizes deployment costs while satisfying QoS constraints. We evaluate SlicePilot on a multi-cloud testbed and demonstrate a 19x speed-up over combinatorial optimization methods, while keeping deployment costs within 7.8% of the optimal. Although SlicePilot results in 2.42x more QoS violations under high-load conditions, this trade-off is offset by faster decision-making and reduced computational overhead. Overall, SlicePilot delivers a scalable, cost-efficient solution for network slice placement, making it suitable for real-time deployments where responsiveness and efficiency are critical.

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arXiv2025

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

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.

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arXiv2023

A First Look at 5G Core Deployments on Public Cloud: Performance Evaluation of Control and User Planes

The Fifth Generation (5G) mobile core network is designed as a set of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) hosted on Commercial-Off-the-Shelf (COTS) hardware. This creates a growing demand for general-purpose compute resources as 5G deployments continue to expand. Given their elastic infrastructure, cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are attractive platforms to address this need. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the control and user plane Quality of Service (QoS) performance associated with deploying the 5G core on top of a public cloud. To account for both software and communication costs, we build a 5G testbed using open-source components spanning multiple locations within AWS. We present an operational breakdown of the performance overhead for various 5G use cases using different core deployment strategies. Our results indicate that moving specific VNFs into edge regions reduces the latency overhead for key 5G operations. Furthermore, we instantiated multiple user plane connections between availability zones and edge regions with different traffic loads. We observed that the deterioration of connection quality varies depending on traffic loads and is use case specific. Ultimately, our findings provide new insights for Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) for optimal placements of their 5G core functions.

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arXiv2022

Securing 5G OpenRAN with a Scalable Authorization Framework for xApps

The ongoing transformation of mobile networks from proprietary physical network boxes to virtualized functions and deployment models has led to more scalable and flexible network architectures capable of adapting to specific use cases. As an enabler of this movement, the OpenRAN initiative promotes standardization allowing for a vendor-neutral radio access network with open APIs. Moreover, the O-RAN Alliance has begun specification efforts conforming to OpenRAN's definitions. This includes the near-real-time RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC) overseeing a group of extensible applications (xApps). The use of these potentially untrusted third-party applications introduces a new attack surface to the mobile network plane with fundamental security and system design requirements that are yet to be addressed. To secure the 5G O-RAN xApp model, we introduce the xApp Repository Function (XRF) framework, which implements scalable authentication, authorization, and discovery for xApps. We first present the framework's system design and implementation details, followed by operational benchmarks in a production-grade containerized environment. The evaluation results, centered on active processing and operation times, show that our proposed framework can scale efficiently in a multi-threaded Kubernetes microservice environment and support a large number of clients with minimal overhead.

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