Comparison of Provider Backbone Bridging, TRILL, GRE and GTP-U in 5G for Time Sensitive Industrial Applications

The support of industrial communication is one of the new services targeted by 5G. This includes use cases like discrete automation, process automation and intelligent transport systems, which have strong requirements on ultra-reliability, low latency and often also on deterministic date delivery. In contrast to many other IP based services, the industrial services are typically Real-Time Ethernet based. For an efficient support of such Ethernet based services, this paper analyses alternatives to 3GPPs GTP-U/UDP/IP or GRE/IP user plane tunneling used on various interfaces inside the core, the access and between access and core. The proposal of this paper is to avoid IP-based tunneling below the Ethernet end-to-end layer and use Ethernet-over-Ethernet instead. Ethernet over Ethernet can be realized by using IEEE Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) or the IETF TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL). This paper compares the GTP-U, GRE, PBB and TRILL approach and gives a recommendation on which alternative to use in a 5G network supporting applications with deterministic traffic requirements.