1 Introduction

This document provides information about the role of Oracle Communications Cloud Native Core, Converged Policy (Policy) in 5G Service Based Architecture and how to configure and use Policy services and managed objects.

1.1 Overview

Policy is a key component of the 5G Service Based Architecture(SBA). It provides a flexible, secure, and scalable policy designing solution. Policy interacts with other network functions to perform usage monitoring, network behavior management, and governance. It helps operators to design, test, and deploy different network policies supporting 5G deployments. Policy is designed and built with a microservice based architecture on cloud native principles. It uses network, subscriber, and service information to help service providers create policies and determine how and under what conditions subscribers and applications use network resources. It helps in minimizing network utilization while maximizing the quality of experience for operators. Policy solution supports deployments into any cloud, including containers on Bare Metal managed by Kubernetes or VMs managed by OpenStack.

Note:

The performance and capacity of the Policy system may vary based on the Call model, Feature/Interface configuration, underlying CNE and hardware environment, including but not limited to the complexity of deployed policies, policy table size , object expression and custom json usage in Policy design.

Policy is a network function for policy control decision and flow based charging control. It consists of the following functions:

  • Policy rules for application and service data flow detection, gating, QoS, and flow based charging to the Session Management Function (SMF)
  • Access and Mobility Management related policies to the Access and Mobility Management Function (AMF)
  • UE Route Selection Policies (URSP) rules to User Equipement (UE) through AMF
  • Access to subscription information relevant for policy decisions in a Unified Data Repository (UDR)
  • Network control for service data flow detection, gating, and Quality of Service (QoS)
  • Flow based charging towards the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF)
  • Receiving session and media related information from Application Function (AF) and informing AF of traffic plane events
  • Provision of Policy and Charging Control (PCC) Rules to Policy and Charging Enforcement Function (PCEF) through the Gx reference point
Policy supports the above functions through the following services:
  • Session Management Service
  • Access and Mobility Service
  • Policy Authorization Service
  • User Equipment (UE) Policy Service
  • PCRF Core Service
  • Binding Service
  • Policy Data Source Service
  • Usage Monitoring Service
  • Notifier Service
  • NWDAF Agent

1.2 References

You can refer to the following documents for more information.