  Mobile core networks handle critical control functions for delivering
services in modern cellular networks. Traditional point-to-point architectures,
where network functions are directly connected through standardized interfaces,
are being substituted by service-based architectures (SBAs), where core
functionalities are finer-grained microservices decoupled from the underlying
infrastructure. In this way, network functions and services can be distributed,
with scaling and fail-over mechanisms, and can be dynamically deployed,
updated, or removed to support slicing. A myriad of network functions can be
deployed or removed according to traffic flows, thereby increasing the
complexity of connection management. In this context, 3GPP Release 16 defines
the service communication proxy (SCP) as a unified communication interface for
a set of network functions. In this paper, we propose a novel software-defined
networking (SDN)-based solution with the same role for a service mesh
architecture where network functions can be deployed anywhere in the
infrastructure. We demonstrated its efficiency in comparison with alternative
architectures.
