5G User Plane Function Acceleration with Programmable Dataplanes
AccelUPF introduces a 5G User Plane Function (UPF) that offloads both data forwarding and Packet Forwarding Control Protocol (PFCP) signaling message processing to programmable hardware like P4 switches and smartNICs. Unlike prior work, which only offloads data forwarding, AccelUPF’s full offload design demonstrates superior performance—crucial for applications with high signaling traffic (e.g., IoT)—through novel parsing, fastpath/slowpath task split, memory management, and fault tolerance for session state.