ZTE Helps China Mobile Demonstrate the World's First 5G-Oriented Edge-Opening Hardware Acceleration Platform

ZTE, Lenovo and Keysight helped China Mobile demonstrate the world's first 5G-oriented edge-opening hardware acceleration platform to promote 5G development at the MWC Shanghai Exhibition On June 26th . 

In this demonstration, ZTE successfully demonstrated edge-opening hardware acceleration platform-based 5G user plane Common Core UPF (User Plane Function) solution, which breaks through the current performance and latency bottlenecks of virtualized forwarding, achieving ultra-high throughput and ultra-low delay of the virtualized forwarding plane, and accelerating the commercial process of 5G URLLC and eMBB. In the 2019 MWC in Barcelona, ZTE launched the leading Common Core UPF solution, which inserts smart network cards into the compact and general rack server with low power consumption and oriented to mobile edge computing, for deploy 5G UPF/GW-U.

At the Shanghai exhibition, China Mobile Research Institute innovatively proposed the concept, architecture, and design of hardware acceleration and opening platform for edge scenarios. The acceleration platform uses the UPF as the entry point, considering about the resources, space, and power supply problems of the equipment room under edge scenarios, on one hand, hardware acceleration is implemented for UPF media forwarding through smart NICs. Most traffic is unloaded from CPUs to smart NICs to obtain higher forwarding performance and reduce CPU usage, so as to occupy less resources than virtualized UPFs without acceleration card under the same throughput. On the other hand, the logical interface between the last software of UPF and the acceleration hardware is defined to ensure that UPF NEs can invoke the acceleration capability of different vendors' acceleration cards to implement software&hardware decoupling and resources pooling. 

As one of the leading network cloudification and 5G enterprises, ZTE will work together with colleagues to deepen the research on forwarding-plane NE hardware acceleration technologies, promote the implementation of solutions, and help operators gain opportunities in the 5G construction.