Abstract: The fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) technology is expected to be flexible enough to meet the diverse requirements of future applications. Enabled by software defined network/network function virtualization, 5G network functions could be software running on general servers. But the performance will decrease compared to traditional dedicated hardware paradigm, especially for user plane functions (UPFs). In order to improve the performance of data processing in softwareized UPF, we design and implement a UPF prototype following vector packets processing (VPP) technology, which consists of packet forwarding control protocol module, open-source VPP module, and corresponding interfaces. Two experiments are constructed for the validation of its functionalities and performance. The results show that the proposed UPF can interconnect with commercial base station, commercial terminals, and open-source 5G core network. Meanwhile, its data throughput makes obvious improvement over Linux kernel-based approaches.

Key words: the fifth generation of mobile communications system core network, vector packet processing, user plane function