Considerations on deploying high-performance container-based NFV

Abstract

Over the last few years, the idea of network function virtualization (NFV) has become widespread, shifting the workload of hardware-based middleboxes onto applications on commodity hardware. Virtual machine is the common building block of the NFV platform, but its overhead on running additional OSes is a major drawback. With smaller overhead than VMs, containers are tested as the NFV platform, but their packet processing throughput is yet unsatisfactory. (≈ 1.1Mpps).In this paper, we focus on alternative performance evaluation of container-based NFV. We setup an evaluation system that forwards generated packets to container which returns back the network traffic to host and packet generator. As a result, we construct a container image that processes millions of packets per second (2.6Mpps) with low-latency (≤ 25μs) while keeping its size to the minimum (7.8MB). In addition, chaining of the container-based NF application shows that it preserves the high-performance (process over a million packets per seconds with latency ≈ 100μs) while adding up to 5 containers into the chain. Our evaluation system of lightweight, high-performance NFV requires no kernel modification nor hardware acceleration. To this end, we utilize BESS as a virtual switch for containers. As the main form of our work is not in the application development, we take full advantage of Click for network functions implementation in our evaluation.