Data plane programmability solution for Telecom protocols

The concept of SDN is finding its way into mobile networks, however an OpenFlow based approach for switching still keeps a gap open between fixed hardware based and software based implementations. In order to fill this gap, the proposed concept enables deep data plane programmability at infrastructure level and thus to reduce the inflexibility of the data path. The approach is to program the data path directly at the forwarding switch level using protocols such as P4. In this paper we propose a P4 protocol based solution of mobile core networks data plane, to bring ultra low latency and high capacity requirements with respect to high flexibility for new services, through offloading the forwarding functionality to completely white switches such as the ones deployed on the data center networks. In this case study we show an reference implementation of virtualized packet core using deep data plane programming. A basic implementation of the proof of concept is presented using the Fraunhofer Open5GCore and a set of evaluations, through this proving that such solutions are feasible and should be explored further especially when multiple networks are deployed in parallel and use the same infrastructure.