High-Performance UPF Design Based on DPDK
Haoran Zhang, Zikang Chen, Yang Yuan · 2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT) · 2021
As the most critical network element on the user plane of the 5G core network, UPF (User Plan Function) carries important functions such as user data processing and forwarding. The performance of UPF has a great impact on the delay, bandwidth, jitter and other indicators of the entire system. Therefore, we need high-performance UPF with efficient data processing and forwarding capabilities. In order to achieve highperformance UPF, we will optimize the performance of UPF from three aspects. First of all, on the UPF architecture, we decoupled the UPF into two parts: the control sub-module and the forwarding sub-module. Secondly, in order to achieve the high throughput design requirements of the user plane, we used the DPDK (Data Plan Development Kit) solution to replace the Linux kernel network protocol stack forwarding mode. Finally, in order to realize the fast-forwarding processing operation of the message, we designed a fast matching and forwarding module based on the traditional message matching and forwarding rules to achieve efficient indexing and matching. Through the optimization of the above three parts, our pure soft UPF solution has a single machine measured performance of up to 40Gbps, which is easy to expand and deploy and meet the needs of different scenarios in the industry.