Feature Description

The Cisco SMF has a three-tier architecture consisting of Protocol, Service, and Session tiers. Each tier includes a set of microservices (pods) for a specific functionality. Within these tiers, there exists a Kubernetes Cluster comprising Kubernetes (K8s) master and worker nodes (including Operation and Management nodes).

For high availability and fault tolerance, a minimum of two K8s worker nodes are required for each tier. You can have multiple replicas for each worker node. Kubernetes orchestrates the pods using the StatefulSets controller. The pods require a minimum of two replicas for fault tolerance.

SMF Architecture

An SMF K8s Cluster contains 12 nodes:

  • Three Master nodes.

  • Three Operations and Management (OAM) worker nodes.

    OAM worker nodes host the Ops Center pods for configuration management and metrics pods for statistics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

  • Two Protocol worker nodes.

    Protocol worker nodes host the SMF protocol-related pods for service-based interfaces (N11, N7, N10, N40, NRF), UDP-based protocol interfaces (N4, S5/S8, RADIUS) and TCP-based interfaces Diameter (Gx/Gy), and GTPP (Gz).

  • Two Service worker nodes.

    Service worker nodes host the SMF application-related pods that perform session management processing.

  • Two Session (data store) worker nodes.

    Session worker nodes host the database-related pods that store subscriber session data.