TY - GEN
T1 - A P4-based 5G User Plane Function
AU - Macdavid, Robert
AU - Cascone, Carmelo
AU - Lin, Pingping
AU - Padmanabhan, Badhrinath
AU - Thakur, Ajay
AU - Peterson, Larry
AU - Rexford, Jennifer
AU - Sunay, Oguz
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.
PY - 2021/10/11
Y1 - 2021/10/11
N2 - The demands on mobile networks are constantly evolving, but designing and integrating new high-speed packet processing remains a challenge due to the complexity of requirements and opacity of protocol specifications. 5G data planes should be implemented in programmable hardware for both speed and flexibility, and extending or replacing these data planes should be painless. In this paper we implement the 5G data plane using two P4 programs: one that acts as a open-source model data plane to simplify the interface with the control plane, and one to run efficiently on hardware switches to minimize latency and maximize bandwidth. The model data plane enables testing changes made to the control plane before integrating with a performant data plane, and vice versa. The hardware data plane implements the fast path for device traffic, and makes use of microservices to implement functions that highspeed switch hardware cannot do. Our data plane implementation is currently in limited deployment on three university campuses where it is enabling new research on mobile networks.
AB - The demands on mobile networks are constantly evolving, but designing and integrating new high-speed packet processing remains a challenge due to the complexity of requirements and opacity of protocol specifications. 5G data planes should be implemented in programmable hardware for both speed and flexibility, and extending or replacing these data planes should be painless. In this paper we implement the 5G data plane using two P4 programs: one that acts as a open-source model data plane to simplify the interface with the control plane, and one to run efficiently on hardware switches to minimize latency and maximize bandwidth. The model data plane enables testing changes made to the control plane before integrating with a performant data plane, and vice versa. The hardware data plane implements the fast path for device traffic, and makes use of microservices to implement functions that highspeed switch hardware cannot do. Our data plane implementation is currently in limited deployment on three university campuses where it is enabling new research on mobile networks.
KW - 5G
KW - Mobile networking
KW - P4
KW - Programmable dataplanes
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85119413673&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85119413673&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3482898.3483358
DO - 10.1145/3482898.3483358
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85119413673
T3 - SOSR 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research
SP - 162
EP - 168
BT - SOSR 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2021 ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research, SOSR 2021
Y2 - 20 September 2021 through 21 September 2021
ER -