How to Hardware Accelerate Your 5G CU

We present Loki, an approach to accelerate existing software-based CUs using commodity network hardware infrastructure, such as network switches and SmartNICs. Loki uses an in-band stateful migration protocol to handle the transfer of user-plane traffic between software and hardware. The protocol incorporates techniques to manage state inconsistency caused by packet loss and reordering. To improve performance, Loki dynamically moves user traffic processing between hardware and software to maximize hardware usage while reducing the workload on the software. We prototype Loki using an Intel Tofino2 switch coupled with an OCTEON TX2 CN96XX ARM SoC and integrate Loki with an open-source 5G stack. Our evaluations on a real 5G testbed show that Loki achieves orders-of-magnitude improvements in throughput and latency, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical deployability.