An In-Kernel Solution Based on XDP for 5G UPF: Design, Prototype and Performance Evaluation
Thiago A. Navarro do Amaral, Raphael Vicente Rosa, David Moura, Christian Esteve Rothenberg
Abstract
The edge computing infrastructure can scale from datacenters to single device. The well-known technology for fast packet processing is DPDK, which has outstanding performance regarding the throughput and latency. However, there are some drawbacks when the usage is done in the edge: (i) the polling mechanism for packet processing keeps the CPU exclusively occupied even if there is no traffic, leading to wasted resources; and (ii) DPDK interface becomes unavailable for the applications inside the host, so the integration between a non-DPDK application and a DPDK application becomes a hard task. In this paper, we propose an open-source in-kernel 5G UPF solution based on 3GPP Release 16 to be deployed in a restrictive environment like MEC, where MEC host and UPF are collocated with the Base Station, sharing the same computational and network resources. The solution leverages the eBPF/XDP, a novel Linux kernel technology for fast packet processing. We show it can scale and achieve 10 Mpps using only 60% of the CPU with 6 cores.