TurboEPC: Leveraging Dataplane Programmability to Accelerate the Mobile Packet Core

Recent architectures of the mobile packet core advocate the separation of the control and dataplane components, with all signaling messages being processed by the control plane entities. This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of TurboEPC, a redesign of the mobile packet core that revisits the division of work between the control and data planes. In TurboEPC, the control plane offloads a small amount of user state to programmable dataplane switches, using which the switches can correctly process a subset of signaling messages within the dataplane itself. The messages that are offloaded to the dataplane in TurboEPC constitute a significant fraction of the total signaling traffic in the packet core, and handling these messages on dataplane switches closer to the end-user improves both control plane processing throughput and latency. We implemented the TurboEPC design using P4-based software and hardware switches. The TurboEPC hardware prototype shows throughput and latency improvements by up to 102x and 98% respectively when the switch hardware stores the state of 65K concurrent users, and 22× and 97% respectively when the switch CPU is busy forwarding dataplane traffic at linerate, over the traditional EPC.