Building a 5G UPF That Actually Saturates a 10G Link: VPP + DPDK + Open5GS in Production
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Building a 5G UPF with VPP+DPDK+Open5GS is a highly technical production networking guide, directly relevant to cloud infrastructure.
Summary
A production 5G UPF built on VPP and DPDK achieved 8.5–9 Gbps on a 10G link, replacing a socket-based Open5GS baseline that topped out at 850 Mbps. The design removes the kernel from the packet path using DPDK poll-mode drivers and VPP's graph-node architecture, processing packets in vectors to amortize overhead. Key challenges included integrating with Open5GS's SMF via PFCP and hitting PCIe bus limits as the final bottleneck.