Improve failure-aware UPF selection criteria

Refine the failure-aware User Plane Function (UPF) selection mechanism by improving its ranking criteria and integrating load and latency awareness, thereby strengthening UPF selection beyond the current prioritization of failure count and time since last failure.

Background

The paper introduces a failure-aware UPF selection mechanism for newly arriving user equipment. The mechanism ranks available UPFs primarily according to their recorded failure history, prioritizing nodes with fewer failures and longer periods since their most recent failure, and then filters them according to slice and Data Network Name compatibility.

The authors explicitly characterize improvement of this mechanism as an open area and identify two concrete directions: refining the ranking criteria and incorporating load and latency awareness. These extensions are intended to make UPF selection more responsive to current operating conditions rather than relying mainly on historical failures.

References

While the current implementation provides a foundation for smarter UPF selection, it remains an open area for further improvement. Future work could refine the ranking criteria and integrate load and latency awareness.

— A Dynamic UPF Fault Recovery Mechanism for Enhanced Resilience in 5G Core Networks  (2610.03245 - Behnaminia et al., 2 Oct 2026) in Section 7, Conclusion and Future Work