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Due to better cost benefits, P4 programmable switches have been considered in a few recent works to implement 5G User Plane Function (UPF). To circumvent limited resources on P4 programmable switches, they either ignore some essential UPF features or resort to a hybrid deployment approach which requires extra resources. This work is aimed to improve the performance of UPFs with comprehensive features which, except packet buffering, are deployable entirely on commodity P4 programmable switches. We build a baseline UPF based on prior work and analyze its key performance bottlenecks. We propose a three-tiered approach to optimize rule storage on the switch ASICs. We also develop a novel scheme that combines pendulum table access and selective usage pulling to reduce the operational latency of the UPF. Using a commodity P4 programmable switch, the experimental results show that our UPF implementation can support twice as many mobile devices as the baseline UPF and 1.9 times more than SD-Fabric. Our work also improves the throughputs in three common types of 5G call flows by 9-619% over the UPF solutions in two open-source 5G network emulators. 

As 5G networks are gradually rolled out worldwide, it is important to ensure that their network infrastructures are resilient against malicious attacks. This work presents VET5G, a new virtual end-to-end testbed for 5G network security research experiments or training activities such as Capture-The-Flag competitions. The distinguishing features of VET5G include a home-grown 5G core network emulator written in Rust to ensure memory and thread safety, integration of OpenAirInterface’s Radio Access Network emulator and the official Android emulator to achieve full end-to-end 5G network emulation, inclusion of a reference P4 software switch to assist with prototyping of defense mechanisms for 5G data planes, implementation of Python APIs for easy 5G network experimentation, and adoption of JupyterHub to support multi-user experimentation. In our experiments we demonstrate how to use VET5G for two attack scenarios in 5G networks as well as its performance when it is used in a 5G hacking project for a Mobile Systems Security course.