Seminar Presentation by a new LINCS associate member "PerformanceBenchmarking of State-of-the-Art Software Switches for NFV"
2020-10-14 14:00 - 15:00 (Europe/Paris)
With the goal of replacing proprietary hardware appliances withVirtual Network Functions (VNFs) implemented in software, Network FunctionVirtualization (NFV) has gained popularity in the past few years. Softwareswitches are widely employed to route traffic between VNFs and physicalNetwork Interface Cards (NICs). It is thus of paramount importance tocompare the performance of different switch designs and architectures. Inthis paper, we propose a methodology to compare fairly and comprehensivelythe performance of software switches. We first explore the design spaces of7 state-of-the-art software switches and then compare their performanceunder four representative test scenarios. Each scenario corresponds to aspecific case of routing NFV traffic between NICs and/or VNFs. In ourexperiments, we evaluate the throughput and latency between VNFs in two ofthe most popular virtualization environments, namely virtual machines(VMs) and containers. Our experimental results show that no single softwareswitch prevails in all scenarios. It is, therefore, crucial to choose themost suitable solution for the given use case. At the same time, thepresented results and analysis provide a more in-depth insight into thedesign tradeoffs and identify potential performance bottlenecks that couldinspire new designs.
