Mukute, TSantos de Brito, MLysko, Albert AMwangama, JMagedanz, T2025-03-252025-03-252024-10http://hdl.handle.net/10204/14203This paper investigates the performance difference of critical 5G User Equipment (UE) procedures when deployed on a Kubernetes platform versus a traditional bare-metal deployment. We leverage Open5GS, an open-source implementation of the 5G Core (5GC), to evaluate the impact of containerisation on key performance metrics. The research answers (i) how the performance of critical 5G UE procedures differs when 5GC is deployed on a Kubernetes environment compared to a traditional bare-metal deployment and (ii) provides the measurable cost introduced by Kubernetes in terms of key 5G performance metrics. We evaluated throughput and latency. The paper analyses the observed performance differences against theoretical expectations arising from the Kubernetes architecture overhead and insights from related work. Our study reveals a 7% performance degradation in throughput for UE procedures running on Kubernetes compared to bare-metal when handling more than 300 initiated UE devices.Fulltext5G CoreKubernetesLoad TestingNetwork Traffic GeneratorNFVOpen5GSTestbedConference PresentationN/A