Loki - How to Hardware Accelerate Your 5G CU

This repository holds the reference implementation for our IEEE INFOCOM'26 paper, "How to Hardware Accelerate Your 5G CU".

Overview

Loki presents an approach to accelerate existing software-based CUs using commodity network hardware infrastructure, such as network switches and SmartNICs. Loki uses an in-band stateful migration protocol to handle the transfer of user-plane traffic between software and hardware. To improve performance, Loki dynamically moves user traffic processing between hardware and software to maximize hardware usage while reducing the workload on the software.

Repository Structure

NOTE: This repository is still under construction as we are preparing the release. More components and documentation will be added gradually as the conference date approaches. Please check back later for the complete code and documentation. Thank you for your patience!

• src/: Contains the source code for the various components of Loki, including Loki-HW, Loki-MM, and Loki-MH.
• docs/: Documentation related to the Loki system, including the testbed setup and configuration instructions.

Citation

If you find this work useful in your research, please cite our paper:

@INPROCEEDINGS{2026-INFOCOM-Loki,
  author={Xin Zhe Khooi and Satis Kumar Permal and Cha Hwan Song and Nishant Budhdev and Raj Joshi and Mun Choon Chan},
  booktitle={IEEE INFOCOM}, 
  title={{How to Hardware Accelerate Your 5G CU}}, 
  year={2026}
}

Contact

For any questions, or if you have any comments or feedback, there are two ways to reach out.

• File a GitHub issue under this repo.
• Drop an email to khooixz [at] comp [dot] nus [dot] edu [dot] sg.