A Truly Cloud-Native Core Network: Rethinking Architecture for Stateless, Elastic, and Deterministic Scale

Mobile core networks have traditionally been adapted for cloud environments through virtualization and containerization, without reexamining their architectural foundations. Even modern 5G deployments still exhibit constrained elasticity, embedded state coupling, and unpredictable behavior under load. This article proposes a new core network architecture built as a set of cloud-native, stateless, and elastically scalable services. The design is structured around six foundational principles: stateless compute, horizontal scalability, microservice decomposition, resilience by design, loose inter-service coupling, and platform independence, treated as prerequisites for deterministic performance in highly dynamic environments. We implemented these principles in the Open6GCore toolkit, a full-stack prototype that externalizes subscriber state, decomposes core functions into independently scalable units, and employs native orchestration interfaces for lifecycle management. Measurements on Open6GCore show that once sufficient capacity is provisioned, per-subscriber completion times and throughput remain essentially constant across a wide range of user loads. This demonstrates that a core network designed from first principles for the cloud can achieve deterministic scaling behavior and operational transparency, and provides a concrete reference for future mobile core networks that operate as true cloud services.