dc.description.abstract | With the popularization of 5G network, it enables a new kind of network that is designed to connect virtually everyone and everything together including machines and devices,that is to say, there will be more demand for network equipment in the future. In order to meet high bandwidth and low-latency network environment, it is important to enhance the ability for packet forwarding in 5G user plane. Different from the past solutions, our architecture will offload packet forwarding function to the ASIC(Application Specific Integrated Circuit) chip from CPU, so that it is not limited by the capability of the CPU. Hardware is helpful to face the large amount of data flow with massive network applications in the future.
This article focuses on the forwarding data plane in 5G UPF(User Plane Function), and our design uses the programmable P4(Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors) pipeline to realize fast packet forwarding in 5G data plane. The flexibility and customizable features of P4 make the network application more extensive. Therefore, in our architecture, the user data between 5G SMF(Session Management Function) and UPF will be eventually extracted into P4 pipeline. The execution file is for simulating the control plane, it will use the package in the P4 SDE(Software Development Environment) to issue commands from the control plane to the P4-UPF Pipeline through Barefoot-Runtime. This article uses this to simulate the control layer instead of directly adding the existing control layer solution to the architecture. Because the overall architecture is built in SONiC(Software for Open Networking in the Cloud), SONiC is used to decouple software and hardware. In the future, other related solutions can be used to combine with our architecture with control plane solutions to achieve better architecture extension characteristics.
The experimental results show that P4-UPF has higher bandwidth than 5G UPF, and provides a lower latency and more stable network environment. The experimental results also show that the P4-UPF architecture can achieve video streaming application. The above architecture not only provides higher flexibility, but can also achieve QoS(Quality of Service), data plane telemetry and other research with P4, also the architecture could be applied to more diverse network fields in the future. | en_US |