Tokyo, Japan – NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) has confirmed that its User Plane Function (UPF) for processing user data traffic in 5G core networks (5GC) has achieved an industry-leading throughput of 1.3Tbps per server on Intel servers with 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

As 5G advances towards the Beyond 5G/6G era, and next-generation information and communications infrastructure are introduced, communications traffic is expected to increase dramatically due to the spread of high-definition video distribution, AR, VR, and AI. Under these circumstances, telecom operators are being compelled to continuously expand their facilities, resulting in increased power consumption and costs that are becoming a major business challenge.

In recent years, NEC has been working to improve UPF performance and its processing efficiency by applying advanced approaches such as optimizing CPU processing, accelerating memory access, and reducing memory access delays (1). NEC has also been continuously evaluating the latest hardware to improve performance and has now successfully confirmed the groundbreaking high throughput of 1.3Tbps in testing of a UPF on servers using 4th generation Intel® Xeon® scalable processors. Moreover, NEC has ensured the energy efficiency of the UPF by using Intel® Infrastructure Power Manager, enabling the company to offset the influence of increasing power consumption in pursuit of carbon neutrality (2).

This achievement helps to significantly improve the performance of mobile network traffic processing, as well as contributing to lower power consumption and costs.