Paper Info
Title
Offloading Virtual Evolved Packet Gateway User Plane Functions to a Programmable ASIC.
Abstract
Roll-outs of 5G Mobile Packet Core (MPC) rely on principles and technologies of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). While the benefits of SDN and NFV in terms of flexibility are well-known, how to guarantee data plane performance for critical 5G services is less clear. Advances in programmable switch ASICs render an opportunity to offload data plane virtual network functions (VNFs) running on x86 servers to programmable hardware featuring strict performance guarantees. In this work, we present the design and performance evaluation of a critical element of 5G MPC, namely the virtual Evolved Packet Gateway (vEPG). We describe the P4-based uplink and downlink pipelines and evaluate a software and hardware implementation based on a Barefoot Tofino hardware switch, the ONOS controller, and P4Runtime support to manage match-action tables. The obtained results show that vEPG hardware implementation runs at line rate with low latency (<2 μs) and jitter, scaling up to 1.7 millions active users.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3359993.3366645
ENCP@CoNEXT
DocType
ISBN
Citations 
Conference
978-1-4503-7000-4
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
10
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Suneet Kumar Singh110.70
Christian Esteve Rothenberg21732104.61
P. Gyanesh Patra320.74
Gergely Pongrácz46816.25