Voice over IP Multimedia Subsystems Traffic Filtering on General Purpose Hardware using Multicore Processing

Abstract

Internet Protocol Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) is a set of specifications as defined by 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) research group which is used to provide Multimedia services over IP networks. This system is widely deployed worldwide and the deployments are still increasing. It currently provides multimedia services for Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), 2G, 3G, 4G and 4.5G networks. This results in huge traffic volumes within the IMS network. With the fast development of high-speed networks and with the advent of 5G networks the amount of traffic is expected to increase even further. To process such traffic in the carrier grade environment, dedicated hardware is used which is a very expensive solution. Use of general-purpose hardware to process such traffic is a very attractive alternative. In this study we have developed an IMS traffic filtering solution using Intel Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), a fast packet processing platform. We have designed and developed a multi core solution on general purpose hardware which can filter IMS traffic at the rate of 40 Gbps.