Leveraging Programmable Dataplanes for a High Performance 5G User Plane Function

Emerging 5G applications require a dataplane that has a high forwarding throughput and low processing latency, in addition to low cost and power consumption. To meet these requirements, the state-of-the-art 5G User Plane Functions (UPFs) are built over high performance packet I/O mechanisms like the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), and further offload some functionality to programmable dataplane hardware. In this paper, we design and implement several standards-compliant UPF prototypes, beginning with a software-only DPDK-based UPF, progressing to designs which offload different functions to programmable hardware. We evaluate and compare the performance of these designs, to highlight the costs and benefits of these offloads. Our results show that offload techniques employed in prior work help improve performance in certain scenarios, but also have their limitations. Overcoming these limitations and fully realizing the power of programmable hardware requires offloading more complex functionality than is done today. Our work presents a preliminary implementation towards a comprehensive programmable dataplane-accelerated 5G UPF.