Island-Ready 5G Deployments: Decentralized Core Networks Enabling Crisis Connectivity at the Edge

Abstract

The concept of island readiness envisions that communication networks can fall back to local connectivity islands when global connectivity breaks, e.g., after natural disasters or targeted attacks. Island connectivity would enable users to use crisis-relevant applications hosted at the local edge during crisis response. However, realizing island readiness involves many stakeholders, and this paper is the first to consider the perspective of mobile network operators (MNOs). This paper explains why today’s 5G-Advanced deployments are not island-ready and outlines the options MNOs have to support island connectivity. We introduce a design for island-ready 5G and beyond core networks and demonstrate its functionality in an end-to-end lab testbed with commercial smartphones.