The below diagram presents the circumstance of SmartNIC Datacenter Services across all Clouds. Specifically, SmartNIC is located in edge cloud servers, which belongs to the EC infrastructure and VPC, 5G UPF can use SmartNIC to accelerate the performance.
IEC type 5 project includes OVS-DPDK offload into SmartNIC to accelerate the network performance and save computing resources which is important in the edge cloud environment as well as CT(connection-tracking) is supported and also offloaded into Smart NIC to provide security needs.
part of the UPF functions like load balance, forwarding, dpi, etc offloaded into SmartNIC to enhance the performance of UPF who will be deployed in carrier's edge cloud datacenters