UPF deployment: DPDK, SR-IOV, hugepages for high-throughput

User Plane Function Performance Requirements

The User Plane Function is the most performance-critical component of the 5G Core, responsible for packet processing, forwarding, and policy enforcement on the user data path. A single UPF instance in a production network must handle tens of gigabits per second of throughput with sub-millisecond per-packet latency. Traditional kernel-based networking cannot meet these requirements because each packet triggers context switches between user space and kernel space. DPDK solves this by allowing the UPF to poll network interfaces directly from user space, eliminating interrupts and kernel overhead…