research-article

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

Authors:

Diptyaroop Maji,

Prateek Agarwal,

Mythili VutukuruAuthors Info & Claims

APNet '21: Proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

Pages 57 - 64

https://doi.org/10.1145/3469393.3469400

Published: 01 February 2022 Publication History

Abstract

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.

References

[1]

Cisco highlights next big switch. (2013). https://www.biztechafrica.com/article/cisco-announces-next-big-switch/5448/

[2]

Cavium Xpliant ethernet switch product line. (2015). https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/Bufs/Xpliant-cavium.pdf

[3]

Ericsson Mobility Report. (2016). http://mb.cision.com/Main/15448/2245189/661253.pdf

[4]

3GPP Ref #: 29.244. System architecture for the 5G System (5GS). (2017). https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/29_series/29.244/

[5]

3GPP Ref #:23.501. System architecture for the 5G System (5GS). (2017). https://www.3gpp.org/ftp/Specs/archive/23_series/23.501/

[6]

Minimum requirements related to technical performance for IMT-2020 radio interface(s). (2017). https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-r/opb/rep/R-REP-M.2410-2017-PDF-E.pdf

[7]

Altera. (2019). https://www.mouser.in/manufacturer/altera/

[8]

EZchip. (2019). https://www.radisys.com/partners/ez-chip

[9]

The Kaloom 5G User Plane Function (UPF). (2019). https://www.mbuzzeurope.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Product-Brief-Kaloom-5G-UPF-v1.0.pdf

[10]

Lighting Up the 5G Core with a High-Speed User Plane on Intel Architecture. (2019). https://builders.intel.com/docs/networkbuilders/lighting-up-the-5g-core-with-a-high-speed-user-plane-on-intel-architecture.pdf

[11]

Xilinx. (2019). https://www.xilinx.com/

[12]

5G User Plane Function (UPF) - Performance with ASTRI. (2020). https://networkbuilders.intel.com/solutionslibrary/5g-user-plane-function-upf-performance-with-astri-solution-brief

[13]

I40E Poll Mode Driver. (2020). https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/i40e.html

[14]

Internet Mix (IMIX) Traffic. (2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mix

[15]

Optimizing UPF performance using SmartNIC offload. (2020). https://mavenir.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Mavenir_UPF_Solution_Brief.pdf

[16]

5G testbed at IIT Bombay. (2021). https://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/~5gtestbed/

[17]

5G testbed, DoT, Govt. of India. (2021). https://5gtestbed.in/

[18]

Apache Thrift - Home. (2021). https://thrift.apache.org/

[19]

Cost of Agilio CX SmartNICs. (2021). https://colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/showsearchresults.asp?IDBrand=38&iPageSize=50

[20]

DPDK Overview. (2021). https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/prog_guide/overview.html

[21]

Edgecore Networks AS9516-32D (Tofino-2). (2021). https://stordirect.com/shop/switches/400g-switches/edgecore-networks-as9516-32d/

[22]

Intel Xeon E5-2670 V3 Dodeca-core (12 Core) 2.30 Ghz Processor. (2021). https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Xeon-E5-2670-Dodeca-core-Processor/dp/B00NFA7ILQ#HLCXComparisonWidget_feature_div

[23]

Intel XL710-BM2 Dual-Port 40G QSFP+ PCIe 3.0 x8, Ethernet Network Interface Card. (2021). https://www.fs.com/products/75604.html

[24]

Ashkan Aghdai 2018. Transparent Edge Gateway for Mobile Networks. In IEEE 26th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[25]

Pat Bosshart, Dan Daly, Glen Gibb, Martin Izzard, Nick McKeown, Jennifer Rexford, Cole Schlesinger, Dan Talayco, Amin Vahdat, George Varghese, and David Walker. 2014. P4: Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors. SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 44 (2014).

Digital Library

[26]

Carmelo Cascone and Uyen Chau. 2018. Offloading VNFs to programmable switches using P4. In ONS North America.

[27]

Eyal Cidon, Sean Choi, Sachin Katti, and Nick McKeown. 2017. AppSwitch: Application-layer Load Balancing Within a Software Switch. In Proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking (APNet).

Digital Library

[28]

Edgar Costa. P4 Meter Application. (2020). https://github.com/nsg-ethz/p4-learning/tree/master/examples/meter

[29]

Huynh Tu Dang 2018. Consensus for Non-Volatile Main Memory. In IEEE 26th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP).

[30]

Huynh Tu Dang, Daniele Sciascia, Marco Canini, Fernando Pedone, and Robert Soulé. 2015. NetPaxos: Consensus at Network Speed. In Proceedings of the the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR).

Digital Library

[31]

Hans Giesen, Lei Shi, John Sonchack, Anirudh Chelluri, Nishanth Prabhu, Nik Sultana, Latha Kant, Anthony J McAuley, Alexander Poylisher, André DeHon, 2018. In-network computing to the rescue of faulty links. In Proceedings of the 2018 Morning Workshop on In-Network Computing (NetCompute).

Digital Library

[32]

Rob Harrison, Qizhe Cai, Arpit Gupta, and Jennifer Rexford. 2018. Network-wide heavy hitter detection with commodity switches. In Proceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR).

Digital Library

[33]

Rob Harrison, Shir Landau Feibish, Arpit Gupta, Ross Teixeira, S Muthukrishnan, and Jennifer Rexford. 2020. Carpe Elephants: Seize the Global Heavy Hitters. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Secure Programmable Network Infrastructure (SPIN).

Digital Library

[34]

R. E. Hattachi. Next Generation Mobile Networks, NGMN. (2015). https://www.ngmn.org/wp-content/uploads/NGMN_5G_White_Paper_V1_0.pdf

[35]

Harri Holma and Antti Toskala. LTE Advanced: 3GPP Solution for IMT-Advanced. (2012). https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/lte-advanced-3gpp/9781118399422/c01anchor-3.html

[36]

Thomas Holterbach, Edgar Costa Molero, Maria Apostolaki, Alberto Dainotti, Stefano Vissicchio, and Laurent Vanbever. 2019. Blink: Fast Connectivity Recovery Entirely in the Data Plane. In 16th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI).

[37]

Xin Jin, Xiaozhou Li, Haoyu Zhang, Robert Soulé, Jeongkeun Lee, Nate Foster, Changhoon Kim, and Ion Stoica. 2017. NetCache: Balancing Key-Value Stores with Fast In-Network Caching. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).

Digital Library

[38]

Jaco Joubert. P4 Loadbalancer and Metering. (2017). https://github.com/open-nfpsw/p4_basic_lb_metering_nic

[39]

Naga Katta, Mukesh Hira, Changhoon Kim, Anirudh Sivaraman, and Jennifer Rexford. 2016. HULA: Scalable Load Balancing Using Programmable Data Planes. In Proceedings of the the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR).

Digital Library

[40]

Changhoon Kim, Anirudh Sivaraman, Naga Katta, Antonin Bas, Advait Dixit, and Lawrence J Wobker. 2015. In-band network telemetry via programmable dataplanes. In ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).

[41]

Dr. Kim. 5G stats. (2017). https://techneconomyblog.com/tag/economics/

[42]

DongJin Lee, JongHan Park, Chetan Hiremath, John Mangan, and Michael Lynch. Towards achieving high performance in 5G mobile packet core’s user plane function. (2018). https://builders.intel.com/docs/networkbuilders/towards-achieving-high-performance-in-5g-mobile-packet-cores-user-plane-function.pdf

[43]

Bojie Li, Zhenyuan Ruan, Wencong Xiao, Yuanwei Lu, Yongqiang Xiong, Andrew Putnam, Enhong Chen, and Lintao Zhang. 2017. KV-Direct: High-Performance In-Memory Key-Value Store with Programmable NIC. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).

Digital Library

[44]

Rui Miao, Hongyi Zeng, Changhoon Kim, Jeongkeun Lee, and Minlan Yu. 2017. SilkRoad: Making Stateful Layer-4 Load Balancing Fast and Cheap Using Switching ASICs. In Proceedings of the the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).

Digital Library

[45]

YoungGyoun Moon, SeungEon Lee, Muhammad Asim Jamshed, and KyoungSoo Park. 2020. AccelTCP: Accelerating Network Applications with Stateful TCP Offloading. In 17th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI).

[46]

Barefoot networks. NoviWare 400.5 for Barefoot Tofino chipset. (2018). https://noviflow.com/wp-content/uploads/NoviWare-Tofino-Datasheet.pdf

[47]

David Nowoswiat. Managing LTE Core Network Signaling Traffic. (2013). https://www.nokia.com/en_int/blog/managing-lte-core-network-signaling-traffic

[48]

Recep Ozdag. Intel Ethernet Switch FM6000 Series - Software Defined Networking. (2019). https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/Bufs/ethernet-switch-fm6000-sdn-paper.pdf

[49]

Brian Johnson Robin Giller, Andrey Chilikin. Intel® Ethernet Controller 700 Series GTPv1 - Dynamic Device Personalization. (2018). https://builders.intel.com/docs/networkbuilders/intel-ethernet-controller-700-series-gtpv1-dynamic-device-personalization.pdf/

[50]

Ahmed Saeed, Nandita Dukkipati, Vytautas Valancius, Vinh The Lam, Carlo Contavalli, and Amin Vahdat. 2017. Carousel: Scalable traffic shaping at end hosts. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM).

Digital Library

[51]

Amedeo Sapio, Marco Canini, Chen-Yu Ho, Jacob Nelson, Panos Kalnis, Changhoon Kim, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Masoud Moshref, Dan R. K. Ports, and Peter Richtárik. Scaling Distributed Machine Learning with In-Network Aggregation. (2020). arxiv:cs.DC/1903.06701

[52]

Rinku Shah, Vikas Kumar, Mythili Vutukuru, and Purushottam Kulkarni. 2020. TurboEPC: Leveraging Dataplane Programmability to Accelerate the Mobile Packet Core. In Proceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR).

Digital Library

[53]

Vibhaalakshmi Sivaraman, Srinivas Narayana, Ori Rottenstreich, S. Muthukrishnan, and Jennifer Rexford. 2017. Heavy-Hitter Detection Entirely in the Data Plane. In Proceedings of the the Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR).

Digital Library

[54]

Gábor Soós, Ferenc Nándor Janky, and Pál Varga. 2019. Distinguishing 5G IoT Use-Cases through Analyzing Signaling Traffic Characteristics. In 2019 42nd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP).

[55]

Netronome systems. Agilio CX SmartNICs. (2018). https://www.netronome.com/products/agilio-cx/

[56]

Netronome systems. Agilio CX 2x10GbE SmartNIC. (2020). https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/PB_Agilio_CX_2x10GbE-7-20.pdf

[57]

Netronome systems. Agilio CX 2x25GbE SmartNIC. (2020). https://colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=3144&idcategory=0

[58]

Netronome systems. Agilio CX 2x40GbE SmartNIC. (2020). https://colfaxdirect.com/store/pc/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=2871

[59]

Sami Tabbane. Core network and transmission dimensioning. (2016). https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Regional-Presence/AsiaPacific/SiteAssets/Pages/Events/2016/Aug-WBB-Iran/Wirelessbroadband/core%20network%20dimensioning.pdf

[60]

Amy Viviano, David Coulter, Nick Schonning, Duncan MacMichael, and Bill Latimer. Receive Side Scaling (RSS). (2017). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/network/introduction-to-receive-side-scaling

[61]

Zhaoqi Xiong and Noa Zilberman. 2019. Do Switches Dream of Machine Learning? Toward In-Network Classification. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets).

Digital Library

Cited By

Robin DKhan J(2024)An open-source P416 compiler backend for reconfigurable match-action table switchesComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110246242:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110246
Brito JMoreno JContreras LAlvarez-Campana MBlanco Caamaño M(2023)Programmable Data Plane Applications in 5G and Beyond Architectures: A Systematic ReviewSensors10.3390/s2315695523:15(6955)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23156955
Zhou CZhao BWang B(2023)cUPFCard: High-Performance User Plane Function based on FPGAProceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking10.1145/3600061.3603119(164-165)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600061.3603119
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Leveraging Programmable Dataplanes for a High Performance 5G User Plane Function
1. Networks
  1. Network components
    1. Intermediate nodes
  2. Network types

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

AccelUPF: accelerating the 5G user plane using programmable hardware
SOSR '22: Proceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research

The latest generation of 5G telecommunication networks are expected to provide high throughput and low latency while catering to diverse applications like mobile broadband, dense IoT, and self-driving cars. A high performance User Plane Function (UPF), ...
TurboEPC: Leveraging Dataplane Programmability to Accelerate the Mobile Packet Core
SOSR '20: Proceedings of the Symposium on SDN Research

Recent architectures of the mobile packet core advocate the separation of the control and dataplane components, with all signaling messages being processed by the control plane entities. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of ...
Evaluating Network Stacks for the Virtualized Mobile Packet Core
APNet '21: Proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

Several novel userspace network stacks have been proposed in recent research to overcome the limitations of the Linux network stack in providing high-performance I/O for Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). In this paper, we evaluate the performance of ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

APNet '21: Proceedings of the 5th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

June 2021

79 pages

ISBN:9781450385879

DOI:10.1145/3469393

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 February 2022

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Department of Telecommunications, Govt. of India

Conference

APNet 2021

APNet 2021: 5th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking

June 24 - 25, 2021

Shenzhen, China, China

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 50 of 118 submissions, 42%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
227
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)74
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)8

Reflects downloads up to 26 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Robin DKhan J(2024)An open-source P416 compiler backend for reconfigurable match-action table switchesComputer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110246242:COnline publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.comnet.2024.110246
Brito JMoreno JContreras LAlvarez-Campana MBlanco Caamaño M(2023)Programmable Data Plane Applications in 5G and Beyond Architectures: A Systematic ReviewSensors10.3390/s2315695523:15(6955)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.3390/s23156955
Zhou CZhao BWang B(2023)cUPFCard: High-Performance User Plane Function based on FPGAProceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking10.1145/3600061.3603119(164-165)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600061.3603119
Choi YYoon JMoon YPark K(2023)Is Large MTU Beneficial to Cellular Core Networks?Proceedings of the 7th Asia-Pacific Workshop on Networking10.1145/3600061.3600081(67-73)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3600061.3600081
Kottur SKadiyala KTammana PShah RBarradas DLiu ZCaltais G(2022)Implementing ChaCha based crypto primitives on programmable SmartNICsProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Formal Foundations and Security of Programmable Network Infrastructures10.1145/3528082.3544833(15-23)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3528082.3544833
Panda SRamakrishnan KBhuyan L(2022)Synergy: A SmartNIC Accelerated 5G Dataplane and Monitor for Mobility Prediction2022 IEEE 30th International Conference on Network Protocols (ICNP)10.1109/ICNP55882.2022.9940261(1-12)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICNP55882.2022.9940261
Jain VPanda SQi SRamakrishnan K(2022)Evolving to 6G: Improving the Cellular Core to lower control and data plane latency2022 1st International Conference on 6G Networking (6GNet)10.1109/6GNet54646.2022.9830519(1-8)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/6GNet54646.2022.9830519

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents