Evaluating Network Stacks for the Virtualized 5G Mobile Packet Core
This study evaluates several state-of-the-art network stacks for running compute-intensive 5G control plane VNFs such as AMF and AUSF. Results show that popular userspace kernel bypass network stacks outperform Linux kernel stack on IO intensive VNFs but the gap narrows for CPU-intensive VNFs. The work emphasizes the importance of traffic partitioning at subscriber granularity for scalability. It also profiles the CPU usage breakdown revealing network stack overheads are relatively low compared to VNF computation.