Cloud Native Virtual DPDK Cell Site Router - Kiran KN & Shailender Sharma, Juniper Networks

Cloud Native Virtual DPDK Cell Site Router - Kiran KN & Shailender Sharma, Juniper Networks
In 5G world, ORAN disaggregation is enabling vendor interoperability in a big way. Service providers now no longer need to be tied to a single vendor for the entire RAN eco-system including RRH, BBU, DU etc. The 5G standard enables these components to be disaggregated and further enables some of these to be in a CNF form factor. The enables the need for a orchestrating system like K8s to control the LCM and manageability these. In this scenario, a need arises for a software based virtual router to provide networking capabilities to DUs to enable them to communicate to CUs which are located in a regional data-center. DPDK based virtual cell-site routers (vCSR) are a perfect match here. In Juniper, we have developed a high performance cloud native vCSR using DPDK as the forwarding plane. We have further integrated this with Juniper's feature rich control plane, called RPD (routing protocol daemon). In this talk, we present the architecture of Juniper vCSR and talk about how the DPDK forwarding plane provides connectivity of O-DU's to CUs'. To cater to the use-case, Juniper has developed a pure-L2 mode of operation for the vCSR and we provide details about the same.
Accelerating Network Performance - The most popular kit to accelerate packet processing on a wide variety of CPU architectures Designed to run on x86, POWER and ARM processors, DPDK is a set of libraries running mostly in Linux userland, with a FreeBSD port available for a subset of features. www.dpdk.org/