lapnd/turboepc

Accelerate mobile core network functions using hardware accelerators like programmable switches

TurboEPC

Accelerate mobile core network control plane functions using programmable switches

Publication

Rinku Shah, Vikas Kumar, Mythili Vutukuru, Purushottam Kulkarni. "TurboEPC: Leveraging Dataplane Programmability to Accelerate the Mobile Packet Core". In the ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on SDN Research (SOSR), 2020

Designs:

traditional- All control plane messages serviced by Root controller, only GTP processing at switches.

basic- All offloadable messages (service request/context release/GTP processing) processed at the switch, and attach/detach at the Root controller. We consider that the user state is always available at the switch (always HIT).

parallel- Single chain (one edge switch) with the user context is partitioned among 3 edge switches in parallel.

series- Single chain (one edge switch) with the user context is partitioned among 3 edge switches in series.

FT- Single chain of RAN-DGW-SGW-PGW-SINK with SGW-FT instance where the UE state is mirrored so that under failures the user state at the failed switch is not lost.

handover- In this setup the user registers, establishes session with chain 2, handover is done over chain 1, delete the tunnel created over chain 2. case 6 in ran.cpp is used for this scenario. The load geneator configuration for only handovers is, service_request and s1_release flags are kept false. loop 1 and loop 2 values are set to be 1.

Roadmap

Installation steps : Please follow steps from turboepc/turboepc-hardware/smartnic-setup-steps for hardware Netronome setup and turboepc/turboepc-software/installation_steps.txt for software bmv2 setup

FAQs

ONOS :

a. after too many runs, if the onos does not behave as expected please do the following
1. cd onos
2. rm -rf buck-out 
3. again start onos as usual using run_onos.sh script 
b. To check flows using ONOS  
1. open onos cli using `onos localhost'
2. cli> flows -s
3. For more help on cli goto https://wiki.onosproject.org/display/ONOS/The+ONOS+CLI

Switch :

a. to enable logging in bmv2 switch, rebuild the bmv2 switch with 
   ./configure --enable-debugger --with-pi 'CXXFLAGS=-O0 -g'  
   in the do_bmv2 function in the install-p4-tools.sh  
b. to enable P4Runtime logs  
   comment the line cp ~/log.h ~/p4tools/p4runtime/proto/server/ 
   in scripts/install-p4-tools.sh and re-run it 
c. to check the table entries in switch open switch cli using  
   simple_switch_grpc --thrift-port 9090 
   cli> table_dump <table_name>