A Study on UPF Parameter Provisioning in Mobile Core Network

The 3GPP is standardizing the integration of GPUs, DPUs, firewalls, and D DoS protection into the User Plane Function (UPF) to improve 5G system performance and security. GPUs and DPUs optimize data processing and network operations, while firewalls and DDoS protection enhance security and service availability. However, 3GPP Releases 16 through 19 lack procedures for provisioning these functions and locating UPFs with these capabilities via the Network Repository Function (NRF). This paper proposes methods for parameter provisioning between the Application Function (AF), Network Exposure Function (NEF), Unified Data Management (UDM), Session Management Function (SMF), and UPF, as well as for registering UPFs with these features in the NRF, enabling efficient association setup procedures.