User Plane Performance in Beyond 5G Networks: Comprehensive Analysis and Evaluation
Key: SKM+26
Author: Fridolin Siegmund, Ralf Kundel, Tobias Meuser, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: February 2026
Kind: @article
Publisher: Elsevier
Abstract: Emerging applications such as autonomous driving, virtual reality, and smart factories place greater demands on the Quality of Service of existing network infrastructure, particularly radio networks. The current 5th and new 6th generation of cellular networks aim to meet these requirements and provide ubiquitous connectivity to devices with diverse demands. These networks comprise a control plane and a user plane. While the control plane is responsible for managing the network and its devices, the user plane forwards data and directly influences the experienced Quality of Service. A key network function in the user plane is the User Plane Function (UPF), which forwards packets between cellular network devices and the data network, such as the Internet or an edge data center. However, the extent to which existing UPF implementations can provide sufficient Quality of Service for emerging applications remains largely unexplored. In this work, we analyze and compare various UPF implementations from both theoretical and practical perspectives. We consider both software-based and hardware-accelerated implementations and compare them in terms of performance and latency under load. The setup enables up to 10,000 subscriber sessions while enforcing QoS mechanisms such as rate limiting. The evaluation demonstrates that three of the four investigated UPFs provide QoS enforcement, while their latency behavior differs by orders of magnitude depending on the employed technology.
View Full paper (PDF) | Download Full paper (PDF)
Official URL

The documents distributed by this server have been provided by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, not withstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.