SMF is a session management function in 5G architecture and acts as the anchor point to communicate with UPF (User Plane Function). SD-Core SMF supports interaction with multiple UPFs. SMF supports handling dynamic slice configuration, removal & modification.
SMF has configuration interface to handle slice configuration. Config service is realised using the project - Config Service. SMF exports metrics to prometheus.
- Supports PDU Session Establishment, Modification, Release
- N2/X2 handover
- End Marker Indication to UPF
- PfcpSessionReport
- N1N2MessageTransferFailureNotification handling Callback handling
- Slice based UPF selection
- UE address pool per Slice
- PFCP heartbeat towards UPF
- UE IP-Address allocation via UPF
- QoS call flows in SMF to handle PCC rules in Create Session Policy Response and installing those rules in UPF & UE
- High Availibilty and Cloud Native support(scale up/down number of instances and subscriber store in Database)
- UPF-Adapter for PFCP registration of multiple SMF instances with same node-id to any UPF.
- Keep-alive support with respect to NRF.
- Transaction queueing for the same PDU session.
- SMF metrics available via metric-func to 5g Grafana dashboard.
- Static IP-address provision via configuration.
This includes some of the handling as listed below
- UPF Reconnect if UPF restarts
- PFCP Heartbeat handling towards UPF
- PFCP Transaction timeout and not to wait forever
- SBI message timeout handling and handling timeouts
- Registration towards NRF with updated configuration.
- Retrying NRF registration if NRF is not available.
- Policy Notify from PCF for QoS update
Compliance of the 5G Network functions can be found at 5G Compliance
Design section for SMF is available at SMF Design
- Use helm charts to install SMF OR
- Use AIAB to try out 5G network functions in single node Kubernetes cluster. Refer AIAB Guide
- #sdcore-dev channel in ONF Community Slack
- Raise Github issues