DPDK Summit APAC 2024

PDCP is a protocol that plays a crucial role in the UMTS, LTE and 5G air interfaces. In radio protocol stack, PDCP sits above the RLC (Radio Link Control) layer and below the RRC or user plane upper layers (like IP at the UE). PDCP handles the transfer of both user plane and control plane data. PDCP ensures security of the data transmitted by using ciphering and integrity protection. It has additional features such as in-order delivery, duplicate discard, windowing based anti-replay protection, timer based SDU discard etc. PDCP protocol relies on features that are implemented in DPDK by various libraries such as 1. rte_reorder - in-order delivery, duplicate discards 2. rte_cryptodev & rte_security - ciphering, integrity protection 3. rte_timer & rte_event - timers for SDU discard, reordering Lib PDCP provide a standard abstraction to PDCP datapath processing. The library implements all protocol specific handling with portions of protocol offloaded to rte_cryptodev based on its capability. This session would introduce the protocol, explain changes added in other libraries to adapt it for PDCP use case and generic walkthrough of PDCP library from application usage perspective.