An Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is a totally disaggregated approach to deploying mobile fronthaul and mid-haul networks built entirely on cloud-native principles. Under O-RAN architecture NICs along with accelerators (such as GPU, FPGA etc…) will be placed on the network edge to handle the 5G mac layer. DPDK is a good framework to implement such functionality enabling receiving of the RAW 5G packets for the MAC layer processing. In this talk, we will show how we enabled a full softwarization of the telco Edge (not only 5G) using the different offloads in DPDK that can be used in order to accelerate the 5G packet processing. In specific, the ability to zero-copy between NIC and accelerator, the usage in PTP, advanced flow steering to HW dispatch between the control and data packets, and the usage in the NIC scheduling mechanisms to transmit a packet on a specific time fitting the radio unit receive window.
