Ze-Yu Jin

The 5G Wireless and Wireline Convergence (5G-WWC) standards introduce critical network functions—notably the Access Gateway Function (AGF) and the User Plane Function (UPF)—to enable unified wired and wireless access through a single 5G core. However, deploying and integrating these functions across heterogeneous programmable hardware platforms remains a significant open architectural challenge. This paper presents a configurable integration framework that orchestrates AGF and UPF workloads on heterogeneous programmable data planes, specifically NVIDIA BlueField-2 Data Processing Units (DPUs) and P4-based switches. Unlike traditional, hardware-specific implementations, the framework provides a unified control plane that dynamically manages AGF-only, UPF-only, or Combined AGF/UPF deployments. A hardware abstraction mechanism decouples the control logic from pipeline-specific details, enabling the same control plane to drive different underlying hardware without modification. A Generic Flow Rule interface standardises communication between the control plane and each user-plane backend, while a merged DPU pipeline for Combined AGF/UPF eliminates the redundant GTP-U encapsulation and decapsulation steps inherent in a naively cascaded design. Experiments on NVIDIA BlueField-2 DPUs achieve near-100 Gbps throughput across all three TR-470 scenarios (AGF-only, UPF-only, and Collocated AGF/UPF). The Combined AGF/UPF configuration exhibits lower end-to-end latency than the separated AGF + UPF configuration, confirming both the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed framework for next-generation high-performance programmable networks.

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposed a new non-3GPP access network, the Trusted WLAN Access Network (TWAN), in Release 16 of the 5th Generation Mobile Communication Network (5G). TWAN enables devices without 5G capability to access 5G networks via WLAN, allowing operators to serve non-5G devices in the market through Wi-Fi services. This paper divides TWAN into a control plane and a user plane, which are handled by an SDN controller and P4 switches, respectively. This setup, named P4-TWAN, is further integrated with User Plane Function (UPF) to eliminate unnecessary tunneling. Experimental results show that P4-TWAN processed user traffic at line rate while the integration with UPF benefited from the elimination of unneeded tunneling.