A Packet Processing Scheme in 5G MAC Protocol Using DPDK

In this paper, we propose a packet processing scheme in the MAC protocol of 5G NR. In general, data plane protocols such as MAC, RLC, and PDCP use DPDK library for high-speed data processing. We implement the MAC layer of 5G NR using DPDK library on high performance server platform and measure the packet processing time of the MAC layer. Specifically, the multiplexing and demultiplexing functions of the MAC protocol are implemented and tested on a server platform. Through these measurement results, we found that what affects the packet processing time is the number of MAC SDUs multiplexed into the MAC TB rather than the size of the MAC PDU. We also compare the packet processing time according to the existing packet processing scheme and the newly proposed method applied to 5G NR MAC. Through this, it was confirmed that the new packet processing method shows better performance when a large number of packets are multiplexed into one MAC PDU.