DPDK Open vSwitch performance validation with mirroring feature

Abstract

Network Function Visualization (NFV) and Software Defined Network (SDN) currently play a key role to transform the network architecture from hardware-based to software-based. Along with cloud computing, NFV and SDN are moving network functions from dedicated hardware to software implementation (Virtual Network Functions — VNF), on Virtual Machine (VM) or other virtualization technology such as containers, on top of a virtualized platform in the Cloud. To connect the VNFs, hosted in the same Data Center (DC) or across multiple DCs, virtual switches are required. Besides forwarding functions, virtual switches can be configured to mirror traffics for network management needs. Among the existing virtual switch solutions, Open vSwitch (OVS) is the most known and used. OVS is open source, and included in most of the existing Linux distributions. However, OVS performance in terms of throughput for smaller packets is very smaller than of line rate of the interface. To overcome this limitation, OVS was ported to Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), namely OVDK. The latter achieves an impressive line rate throughput across physical interfaces. In this paper, we present the result of OVDK performance test when flow and port mirroring are activated, which was not tested so far. The performance test focuses on two parameters, throughput and latency in OVDK; allowing to validate the use of OVDK for flow forwarding and network management in the envisioned virtualized network architecture.