Event: ETSI SNS4SNS 2026
Date: February 2-5, 2026
Location: ETSI Headquarters (Sophia Antipolis, France)
Participant organizations: UBI, UoP, PNET
Presenters: Apostolos Prassas (UBI), Georgios P. Katsikas (UBI), Kostis Trantzas (UoP), Christos Tranoris (PNET)
Project: ACROSS HEU
What happened in this event?
UBITECH demonstrated a scenario that integrates multiple open-source platforms together, aiming at offloading a 5G UPF – a crucial 5G Network Function – into programmable networking hardware, based on P4, when 5G users desire high performance slices towards low-latency or high throughput services.
This demonstration stresses the synergy among several open-source platforms to achieve an end-to-end closed loop. At the data plane, the P4-based SD-Fabric work by ONF is fully-integrated into ETSI TFS to provision a 5G UPF dataplane in accordance with state-of-the-art P4 specifications. This is integrated with a real 5G implementation based on Open Air Interface to demonstrate how such as offloaded UPF works in a real 5G deployment. On top of this ecosystem, ETSI TFS manages the configuration of the UPF using a new dedicated service, while ETSI OpenSlice implements an orchestration loop that consumes real-time 5G telemetry information and translates it to decisions for provisioning P4-offloaded UPFs when demanding users appear in the system.
What will be adopted/or what will be considered by ETSI?
ETSI software development groups leverage value from this demo, as the integration of OpenSlice and TFS with a real 5G system and the ability to support demanding users via accelerated 5G functions is crucial for supporting future uses cases towards 6G.
PoC business value
Telecom operators that seek for tailored solutions towards “gold” users (and SLAs) can leverage the OpenSlice, TFS, OAI, and SD-Fabric ecosystem of this demo to monetize demanding SLAs towards customers that wish, e.g., ultra low-latency video services.
Related material
The PoC demo presentation is available here: ETSI-SNS4SNS-upf-offloading
The corresponding demonstration video is available on the ACROSS YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/LQ6zanVX1u4?si=8H281yh197vZKjzr
