Engineers Push Open5GS 5G Core to 9 Gbps Using VPP and DPDK on Commodity Hardware

A software engineering team replaced the socket-based User Plane Function in an Open5GS 5G core with a pipeline built on VPP and DPDK, achieving 8.5–9 Gbps throughput on a standard 10G link. The original implementation peaked at around 850 Mbps because every packet had to pass through the Linux kernel, incurring memory copies, syscalls, and context switches at scale. By adopting DPDK's poll-mode drivers for kernel bypass and VPP's graph-node architecture for batch packet processing, the team eliminated those bottlenecks entirely. The new UPF integrates with Open5GS's Session Management Function via the PFCP control-plane protocol, allowing session rules to be applied at near line rate on commodity x86 hardware. Once software ceased to be the limiting factor, the team found the next constraint shifted to the PCIe bus rather than the NIC or processing logic.