Orchra: Stateful-aware Cross-slice Workload Migrations in the 6G Control Plane

Abstract

Network slicing is a foundational capability of Fifth Generation (5G)-Advanced and emerging Sixth Generation (6G) networks, yet practical support for seamless runtime slice transitions remains limited. Standard cloud-native 5G architectures lack native support for stateful inter/intra-slice session migration, relying instead on high-overhead Non-Access Stratum (NAS) re-registrations, container redeployment etc., which disrupt userplane traffic for up to 245.50 ms. To address this limitation, we present Orchra, an intelligent orchestrator for stateful, low-latency context transfer. By externalizing critical user equipment state-including NAS context, security keys, and Protocol Data Unit (PDU) session information-into a transient staging layer, Orchra preserves session continuity across slice boundaries without requiring full re-registration. Experimental evaluation shows that Orchra reduces this userplane interruption by more than twice in comparison to conventional Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)-based approaches while incurring negligible security overhead. These results demonstrate a practical and reproducible approach for enabling seamless, state-preserving slice transitions in cloud-native 5G-Advanced networks.

Accepted by the IEEE CSCN 2026