DPDK Engineering & Consulting
I help telecom and technology companies build userspace dataplanes with DPDK — the same fast packet-processing techniques used in 4G/5G user-plane functions, tested from first packets on the wire to multi-queue hardware steering at 10G+.
4G / 5G Telecom
Modern 4G LTE and 5G networks move enormous volumes of subscriber traffic through the user plane — at the RAN edge, in the core, and inside virtualized network functions on standard servers. Every millisecond and every CPU cycle counts.
Telecom user-plane workloads — GTP-U encapsulation, IPSec, QoS marking, DPI, and forwarding at the UPF, PGW, or vRouter — must sustain millions of packets per second with predictable latency. The Linux kernel stack adds overhead that makes consistent line-rate processing difficult on commodity hardware.
DPDK bypasses the kernel and drives NICs directly from userspace. It is widely used in NFV and cloud-native telco deployments for high-throughput user-plane functions, load balancers, session border controllers, and edge UPF instances where packets must be received, classified, and forwarded without per-packet syscall cost.
The open-source tools and tutorials I have built map directly to problems telecom engineers face when bringing up, validating, and scaling user-plane software on real NICs.
Services
Practical DPDK work — not slide decks. I ship code, measure on real NICs, and leave your team with something maintainable.
Custom high-speed dataplane apps: RX/TX pipelines, multi-lcore workers, mempools, and ring-based producer/consumer designs.
Throughput and latency tuning — burst sizes, queue depth, NUMA placement, cache-friendly mbuf handling, and NIC statistics analysis.
Program NIC classifiers to redirect, drop, or steer traffic in hardware. Validate rules per PMD (i40e, ixgbe, mlx5) before production.
Packet generators, dumpers, and lab harnesses to stress-test your stack at line rate with measurable, repeatable results.
Software ACL, RSS queue distribution, hardware packet-type parsing, and hybrid designs that minimize CPU per packet.
Code reviews, DPDK onboarding for your team, telemetry integration, and multiprocess designs for control + dataplane separation.
Technical depth
My work spans the full DPDK stack — EAL setup, ethdev configuration, mbuf lifecycle, and driver-specific behavior on production hardware.
Portfolio
A growing body of production-style examples — each demonstrates a specific dataplane capability with runnable code and documented test commands.
~10 Gbps (~7 Mpps, 214-byte frames) on Intel XL710 with hardware checksum offload.
IPv4/UDP match rules for queue redirect and in-NIC drop, validated with NIC statistics.
Multi-queue receive pipelines with per-lcore workers and RSS hash understanding.
Tuple-based packet classification with DPDK ACL for L3/L4 policy enforcement.
Custom telemetry callbacks and multi-queue PCAP capture at high data rates.
Primary/secondary DPDK processes sharing packet work via lock-free ring buffers.
Full catalog: github.com/awaiskhalidawan/dpdk-tutorials
How we work
Understand your throughput targets, NIC hardware, latency budget, and existing stack.
Stand up a DPDK lab environment, bind NICs, and prove the critical path on real traffic.
Use NIC stats, per-queue counters, and controlled generators to quantify behavior.
Hand off documented code, build instructions, and knowledge your team can extend.
Contact
Whether you are building a 5G UPF, scaling a 4G user-plane function, or need a performance audit on an existing NFV dataplane — reach out with a short description of your use case.
Muhammad Awais Khalid
DPDK consultant & high-performance networking engineer
awais.khalid.awan@gmail.com GitHub: dpdk-tutorials Send an inquiry