Deep Data Plane Programmability for Telco Protocols

The purpose of the project is to check the feasibility of offloading fast path packet processing of traditional telco protocols to hardware using P4 protocol, with a focus on latency and performance in 5G networks. P4 serves as an alternative to more used OpenFlow which does not have support for the specific telco protocols. Additionally due to its flexibility, P4 paves path for future research and development of new datapath protocols, which have been a rarity since the lack of such standardized programmable hardware. This would promote the absolute white box concept in telco infrastructure and the openness towards a variety of protocols which was not possible in the proprietary hardware environment. A proof­ of concept will be implemented using the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open5GCore, a comprehensive mobile core network addressing the R&D towards future 5G network environments, through this providing a first prototype of deep programmable data path without requiring specific protocol support from the network card for offloading.