TY - GEN
T1 - A high performance packet core for next generation cellular networks
AU - Qazi, Zafar Ayyub
AU - Walls, Melvin
AU - Panda, Aurojit
AU - Sekar, Vyas
AU - Ratnasamy, Sylvia
AU - Shenker, Scott
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.
PY - 2017/8/7
Y1 - 2017/8/7
N2 - Cellular traffic continues to grow rapidly making the scalability of the cellular infrastructure a critical issue. However, there is mounting evidence that the current Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is ill-suited to meet these scaling demands: EPC solutions based on specialized appliances are expensive to scale and recent software EPCs perform poorly, particularly with increasing numbers of devices or signaling traffic. In this paper, we design and evaluate a new system architecture for a software EPC that achieves high and scalable performance. We postulate that the poor scaling of existing EPC systems stems from the manner in which the system is decomposed which leads to device state being duplicated across multiple components which in turn results in frequent interactions between the different components. We propose an alternate approach in which state for a single device is consolidated in one location and EPC functions are (re)organized for efficient access to this consolidated state. In effect, our design "slices" the EPC by user. We prototype and evaluate PEPC, a software EPC that implements the key components of our design. We show that PEPC achieves 3-7× higher throughput than comparable software EPCs that have been implemented in industry and over 10× higher throughput than a popular open-source implementation (OpenAirInterface). Compared to the industrial EPC implementations, PEPC sustains high data throughput for 10-100× more users devices per core, and a 10× higher ratio of signaling-to-data traffic. In addition to high performance, PEPC's by-user organization enables efficient state migration and customization of processing pipelines. We implement user migration in PEPC and show that state can be migrated with little disruption, e.g., migration adds only up to 4μs of latency to median per packet latencies.
AB - Cellular traffic continues to grow rapidly making the scalability of the cellular infrastructure a critical issue. However, there is mounting evidence that the current Evolved Packet Core (EPC) is ill-suited to meet these scaling demands: EPC solutions based on specialized appliances are expensive to scale and recent software EPCs perform poorly, particularly with increasing numbers of devices or signaling traffic. In this paper, we design and evaluate a new system architecture for a software EPC that achieves high and scalable performance. We postulate that the poor scaling of existing EPC systems stems from the manner in which the system is decomposed which leads to device state being duplicated across multiple components which in turn results in frequent interactions between the different components. We propose an alternate approach in which state for a single device is consolidated in one location and EPC functions are (re)organized for efficient access to this consolidated state. In effect, our design "slices" the EPC by user. We prototype and evaluate PEPC, a software EPC that implements the key components of our design. We show that PEPC achieves 3-7× higher throughput than comparable software EPCs that have been implemented in industry and over 10× higher throughput than a popular open-source implementation (OpenAirInterface). Compared to the industrial EPC implementations, PEPC sustains high data throughput for 10-100× more users devices per core, and a 10× higher ratio of signaling-to-data traffic. In addition to high performance, PEPC's by-user organization enables efficient state migration and customization of processing pipelines. We implement user migration in PEPC and show that state can be migrated with little disruption, e.g., migration adds only up to 4μs of latency to median per packet latencies.
KW - Cellular Networks
KW - EPC
KW - Network Function
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029454101&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85029454101&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3098822.3098848
DO - 10.1145/3098822.3098848
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85029454101
T3 - SIGCOMM 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
SP - 348
EP - 361
BT - SIGCOMM 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 2017 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2017
Y2 - 21 August 2017 through 25 August 2017
ER -