Feature Description

The AMF consists of a three-tier architecture as the following:

  • Protocol

  • Service

  • Session

Each tier from this list includes a set of microservices (pods) for a specific functionality. Within these tiers, a Kubernetes Cluster exists. It comprises K8s or Kubernetes nodes such as master node and worker node (which also includes OAM nodes).

For high availability and fault tolerance, each tier requires a minimum of two K8s worker nodes. Each worker node 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.

The following is a list of 12 nodes in the AMF K8s cluster:

  • Three master nodes

  • Three OAM worker nodes

  • Two protocol worker nodes

  • Two service worker nodes

  • Two session (data store) worker nodes

The K8s cluster supports the following nodes:

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

  • Protocol worker nodes—Hosts the AMF protocol-related pods for the following interfaces:

    • Service-based interfaces (such as N11, N7, N10, N40, and NRF)

    • UDP-based protocol interfaces (such as N4 and S5 or S8)

  • Service worker nodes—Hosts the AMF application-related pods that help in processing the perform session management.

  • Session worker nodes—Hosts the database-related pods that store the data for the subscriber session.