Feature Description

A heartbeat is used to monitor the status of a UPF node in terms of its responsiveness. The heartbeat initiates a bilateral flow of request and response between the SMF and UPF.

The SMF periodically sends a signal in the form of a heartbeat request to the registered UPF node to determine if it is active. If the SMF does not receive a response from UPF after the retransmission attempts are exhausted, then SMF recognizes that a failure has occurred and purges the subscribers that are mapped to that UPF node.

You can control the number of heartbeat requests that SMF sends to UPF, the interval between the consecutive requests, and the duration until which SMF waits for a response.