A Software-Defined Networking Solution for Interconnecting Network Functions in Service-Based 5G Core Architectures

This paper proposes a novel software-defined networking (SDN)-based solution as an alternative to the 3GPP-defined service communication proxy (SCP) for interconnecting network functions in 5G service-based architectures. The proposed SDN-based solution provides the same functionalities as the SCP, such as communication, discovery, load balancing, and monitoring, but in a completely transparent manner to the network functions.