An end-to-end DPDK-integrated open-source 5G standalone Radio Access Network: A proof of concept

The fifth -generation mobile networks are designed to accommodate billions of users worldwide with numerous applications and different service level requirements by providing significantly high data rates and availability with reduced latency. These requirements can be achieved by exploiting Next Generation - Radio Access Network (NG-RAN) architectures. One such famous architecture is Cloud Radio Access Network, whose Next Generation NodeB functions are physically decoupled into different entities - Radio Unit (RU), Distributed Unit (DU), and Central Unit (CU). The Central Units are connected to the 5G Core Network (CN), and all the components are likely to be virtualized and run on the commercial off -the -shelf hardware in the micro/macro data centers. However, decoupling the functionalities in the 5G RAN could not fully help in achieving higher network performance when these functions are run over in -kernel networking stack of the operating system due to overheads involved in the traditional in -kernel approaches during packet processing at the Network Interface Cards (NICs). For example, in -kernel packet processing overheads are context switches, interrupt handling, and memory copies. To address these overheads in the Kernel packet processing, Kernel bypass techniques like Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) must be incorporated into the 5G architecture. In this work, we present the DPDK framework integrated into the publicly available open -source OpenAirInterface software modules. The design and implementation features are incorporated into the 5G radio access network modules, namely DU and CU, and the CN module - User Plane Function (UPF). The measurements taken in the 5G network show performance improvement when deploying the DPDK techniques over the network interface in the 5G midhaul and backhaul communication.