OCUDU Ecosystem Developer Summit

OCUDU gives the Telecom industry a 3GPP and O-RAN compliant, open-source CU/DU stack with multiple Internal Splits and Open Fronthaul Split options. The OCUDU stack is built over a very capable Software architecture, which is easy to scale. But the user plane - specifically the Crypto engine and the N3/F1-U transport interfaces, still rely on general-purpose software primitives that are designed for limited throughput. The mbedTLS based Crypto processes one packet at a time with no session persistence and no batch processing. The N3 and F1-U use kernel UDP sockets with multiple memory copies, syscall overhead, and I/O interrupts. This results in throughput capping at 2–5 Gbps per core and limits the user-plane scalability.
Here is a 2-phase proposal to replace these bottlenecks with DPDK-based alternatives, while preserving existing implementations as fallback option.
Phase 1 - DPDK Crypto Engine. Replace the mbedTLS crypto path in PDCP with DPDK Cryptodev. Today, OCUDU’s security_engine_impl performs:
Phase 2 - DPDK-Based N3 & F1-U Transport (Evolution). Replace the kernel UDP socket interfaces for N3 (toward UPF) and F1-U (toward O-DU and inside O-DU) with DPDK poll-mode drivers.