Heterogeneous UPF Integration Framework and 5G User Plane Acceleration

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes User Plane Function (UPF) in the fifth generation (5G) mobile networks to handle user data between radio access network (RAN) and data network (DN). Since pure software-based UPF does not fulfill the diversified service requirements of 5G networks, researchers have leveraged various hardware acceleration techniques to enhance the performance of UPF. However, different hardware implementations require different installations and adaptations. This paper proposes a framework to integrate various UPF implementations. It is compliant with standard UPF but decouples the control plane function (UPF-CP) from the user plane function (UPF-UP). We implemented UPF-CP by Packet Forwarding Control Protocol (PFCP) Agent with two implementations of UPF-UP: one with Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the other with Smart Network Interface Card (SmartNIC). We integrated the framework with an open-source 5G core network, free5GC, and evaluated the framework by experiments. The results confirm the interoperability of our work with free5GC and demonstrate the superiority of the hardware-accelerated UPF over pure software approach in terms of packet processing speed on the user plane.