A Lean Networking Framework (LeaNet): Potential Technical Space and Approaches for Latency Sensitive Mobile Services

With the development of mobile services such as the Internet of vehicles, industrial Internet, and holographic communication, ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, and pervasive mobility have become common indicators of the comprehensive interconnection between human-machine-things. These common indicators are the foundations to expand the application scenarios of 5G communication technologies and are also the key to achieving the 6G vision. This paper summarizes the technologies in various layers of low-latency mobile networks from a panoramic perspective and highlights the limitations of previous works in terms of mobile network architecture, virtualization technology, and service function chaining (SFC) deployment. Also, the potential techniques space from these three aspects is analyzed. Based on this, a technical framework, named lean networking (LeaNet), is proposed in this paper to reduce latency for network services through global optimization. The compact architecture eliminates triangular routing, thus significantly simplifying the network architecture and reducing both link and node latency. Meanwhile, the network functions virtualization with real-time performance provides a feasible solution to hybrid deployment of multi-scenario and diversified services, especially for latency-sensitive applications. Besides, the framework for intelligent and closed-loop SFC deployment with low latency and high resource efficiency is established and analyzed comprehensively. Simulation studies verify that LeaNet is superior in reducing latency over typical 5G core networks.