cUPFCard: High-Performance User Plane Function based on FPGA

Abstract

The essence of the User Plane Function (UPF) is strong forwarding, and virtualisation architecture by software implemented can not meet high-performance requirements. Thus, hardware acceleration becomes an option. However, existing offloading schemes as an accelerator are not prominent in the latency. In this paper, we implement a demo called cUPFCard to offload UPF into a smart NIC based on FPGA platform, which can provide higher throughput with lower latency. Experiments show that cUPFCard is feasible in the real network. Moreover, the throughput is improved 24 times, and the latency is decreased 41 times.