research-article

Unveiling performance of NFV software dataplanes

Authors:

Yongqiang Tian,

Zhenhua LiAuthors Info & Claims

CAN '17: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cloud-Assisted Networking

Pages 13 - 18

https://doi.org/10.1145/3155921.3158430

Published: 11 December 2017 Publication History

Abstract

The key technology of NFV is software dateplane, which has attracted much attention in both academia and industry recently. Yet, in practice, there is very little understanding about its performance till now. We make a comprehensive measurement study of NFV software dataplanes in terms of packet processing throughput and latency, the most fundamental performance metrics. Specifically, we compare two state-of-the-art open-source NFV dataplanes, BESS and ClickOS, using commodity 10GbE NICs under various typical workloads. Our key observations are that (1) both dataplanes have performance issues processing small (≤128B) packets; (2) it is not always the best to colocate all VMs of a service chain on one server due to NUMA effect. We propose resource allocation strategies to remedy the problems, including carefully adding vNIC queues and CPU cores to vNFs, and distributing VNFs of a service chain to separate servers. To essentially address these problems and scale their performance, software dataplanes need to improve the support for NIC queues and multiple cores.

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Cited By

Liu QZhang TLinguaglossa L(2024)Non-invasive performance prediction of high-speed softwarized network services with limited knowledgeIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621097(2328-2337)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621097
Pekar AMakara LLai YLin YSeah W(2023)P4toNFV: Offloading from P4 switches to NFV in programmable data planesInternational Journal of Communication Systems10.1002/dac.568737:5Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.5687
Kawashima R(2021)Software Physical/Virtual Rx Queue Mapping Toward High-Performance Containerized NetworkingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2020.304905318:1(687-700)Online publication date: Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2020.3049053
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Unveiling performance of NFV software dataplanes
1. Networks
  1. Network performance evaluation
    1. Network measurement
    2. Network performance analysis

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CAN '17: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Cloud-Assisted Networking

December 2017

53 pages

ISBN:9781450354233

DOI:10.1145/3155921

General Chairs:
Puneet Sharma
Hewlett Packard Labs
,
Jinho Hwang
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGCOMM: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 December 2017

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Funding Sources

High-Tech Research and Development Program of China
Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee
National Natural Science Foundation of China

Conference

CoNEXT '17

Sponsor:

SIGCOMM

CoNEXT '17: The 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 11 - 12, 2017

Incheon, Republic of Korea

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Cited By

Liu QZhang TLinguaglossa L(2024)Non-invasive performance prediction of high-speed softwarized network services with limited knowledgeIEEE INFOCOM 2024 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621097(2328-2337)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM52122.2024.10621097
Pekar AMakara LLai YLin YSeah W(2023)P4toNFV: Offloading from P4 switches to NFV in programmable data planesInternational Journal of Communication Systems10.1002/dac.568737:5Online publication date: 21-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1002/dac.5687
Kawashima R(2021)Software Physical/Virtual Rx Queue Mapping Toward High-Performance Containerized NetworkingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2020.304905318:1(687-700)Online publication date: Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/TNSM.2020.3049053
Kawashima R(2021)A Vision to Software-Centric Cloud Native Network Functions: Achievements and Challenges2021 IEEE 22nd International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HPSR)10.1109/HPSR52026.2021.9481848(1-7)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/HPSR52026.2021.9481848
Zhang TLinguaglossa LGallo MGiaccone PIannone LRoberts JMohaisen AZhang Z(2019)Comparing the performance of state-of-the-art software switches for NFVProceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments And Technologies10.1145/3359989.3365415(68-81)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359989.3365415
Liang JBi JZhou YZhang C(2018)In-band Network Function TelemetryProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Conference on Posters and Demos10.1145/3234200.3234236(42-44)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3234200.3234236
Makara LLai YLin YSeah WPekar A(undefined)P4tonfv: Offloading from P4 Switches to Nfv in Programmable Data PlanesSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4090265
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4090265

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