Abstract:
Power efficiency is crucial in softwarized 5G gNBs
due to rising energy costs and CO2 emissions from the networking
infrastructure. SmartNICs have the potential to accelerate packet
processing tasks. However, their limited resources and functionalities
make handling complex tasks like retransmissions challenging.
Offloading operations to server-class processors can improve
scalability but also increase power consumption, warranting
careful management. This study examines the performance and
power consumption of splitting the processing of the 5G gNB between
SmartNICs and DPDK-enabled servers. We implement an
adaptive CPU power conserving strategy in the DPDK data plane
that dynamically adjusts CPU power states using P-states and
C-states based on traffic load. Our evaluation shows that when
using five SmartNICs, we can achieve 95 MPPS, demonstrating
that offloading can boost throughput by up to 40% for gNB
header processing. Our adaptive power management limits CPU
power consumption growth to a maximum of 11%, compared
to 52% without such management, balancing performance and
power efficiency effectively.
