This paper surveys how future cellular networks — often called 5G and beyond, or 6G — can be built on public cloud platforms. The authors collect and organize existing work to show what a cloud-based mobile network looks like. They explain the main design choices, the technical problems that matter, and how big cloud vendors are starting to respond.

The researchers produce a structured taxonomy that divides cloud-based cellular deployments into four parts: deployment architecture (how and where network pieces run), resource management and orchestration (how computing and network resources are assigned), multi-tenancy and isolation (how different customers share the same infrastructure safely), and economic and ownership models (who owns and pays for what). Using that frame, they analyze six key investigation areas: security and privacy; scalability and elasticity (how the system grows and shrinks); performance and latency (speed and delay); cost optimization; resilience and fault management (handling failures); and compliance and sovereignty (legal and data-location rules).

To make the ideas concrete, the paper explains the technical shift driving the change. Mobile networks are moving away from dedicated hardware, called Physical Network Functions (PNFs), toward software that runs in containers. These are called containerized network functions, or CNFs, and are often managed by tools such as Kubernetes. The survey also describes enabling technologies like Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), and OpenRAN, and it explains network slicing — the practice of carving a single physical network into separate virtual networks for different uses.