Performance Analysis of a 5G User Plane Function accelerated with eXpress Data Path in Docker Containers

Components in the 5th Generation mobile networks are designed to be deployed in virtual environments leveraging the advantages of cloud computing. In 5G core networks, the User Plane Function (UPF) forwards user traffic through the data plane, but the additional overhead of virtualization challenges this packet processing. In addition to the socket-based packet handling, we utilize the software acceleration technique eXpress Data Path (XDP) in the UPF of the Open5GCore, which supports virtual interfaces. In this work, we propose a setup to run the XDP-UPF in a Docker Container as an example for a virtual environment. In the evaluation, we compare this deployment to the native system and the previous user space implementation with RFC2544 throughput and latency tests.