The 5G user plane function (UPF) is a critical inter-connection point between the data network and cellular network infrastructure. It governs the packet processing performance of the 5G core network. UPFs also need to be flexible to support several key control plane operations. Existing UPFs typically run on general-purpose CPUs, but have limited performance because of the overheads of host-based forwarding. We design Synergy, a novel 5G UPF running on SmartNICs that provides high throughput and low latency. It also supports monitoring functionality to gather critical data on user sessions for the prediction and optimization of handovers during user mobility. The SmartNIC UPF efficiently buffers data packets during handover and paging events by using a two-level flow-state access mechanism. This enables maintaining flow-state for a very large number of flows, thus providing very low latency for control and data planes and high throughput packet forwarding. Mobility prediction can reduce the handover delay by pre-populating state in the UPF and other core NFs. Synergy performs handover predictions based on an existing recurrent neural network model. Synergy's mobility predictor helps us achieve 2.32× lower average handover latency. Buffering in the SmartNIC, rather than the host, during paging and handover events reduces packet loss rate by at least 2.04×. Compared to previous approaches to building programmable switch-based UPFs, Synergy speeds up control plane operations such as handovers because of the low P4-programming latency leveraging tight coupling between SmartNIC and host.
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E3: Energy-Efficient Microservices on SmartNIC-Accelerated Servers
We investigate the use of SmartNIC-accelerated servers to execute microservice-based applications in the data center. By offloading suitable microservices to the SmartNIC’s low-power processor, we can improve server energy-efficiency without latency loss. However, as a heterogeneous computing substrate in the data path of the host, SmartNICs bring several challenges to a microservice platform: network traffic routing and load balancing, microservice placement on heterogeneous hardware, and contention on shared SmartNIC resources.
We present E3, a microservice execution platform for SmartNIC-accelerated servers. E3 follows the design philosophies of the Azure Service Fabric microservice platform and extends key system components to a SmartNIC to address the above-mentioned challenges. E3 employs three key techniques: ECMP-based load balancing via SmartNICs to the host, network topology-aware microservice placement, and a data-plane orchestrator that can detect SmartNIC overload. Our E3 prototype using Cavium LiquidIO SmartNICs shows that SmartNIC offload can improve cluster energy-efficiency up to 3× and cost efficiency up to 1.9× at up to 4% latency cost for common microservices, including real-time analytics, an IoT hub, and virtual network functions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751231
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10126682
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 19)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 363 - 378
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
