eXpress Data Path Extensions for High-Capacity 5G User Plane Functions

Abstract

In 5th Generation mobile networks, a dedicated User Plane Function (UPF) is responsible for connecting users in the Access Networks with the destination networks. In this work, we extend the UPF with eXpress Data Path enhancements to speed up the forwarding of user plane traffic in the GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP-U). Also, we develop a Receive Side Scaling method in XDP based on GTP-U header information to distribute incoming uplink traffic to the available CPUs.