Abstract
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has revolutionized the way network services are offered, leading Enterprise and Service Providers to increasingly adapt their portfolio of network products in order to reap the benefits of flexible network service deployment and cost reduction promises. With this method, network services are offered in the form of software images instead of dedicated hardware. However, NFV presents several challenges, including standard networking challenges (e.g., security, resilience, and availability), management and orchestration challenges, resource allocation challenges, and performance trade-off challenges of using standard x86 servers instead of dedicated and proprietary hardware. The first three challenges are typical challenges found in virtualization environments and have been extensively addressed in the literature. However, the performance trade-off challenge can be the most impactful when offering networking services, negatively affecting the throughput and delay performance achieved. Thus, in this paper, we investigate and propose several configurations on a virtualized system for increasing the performance in terms of throughput and delay while chaining multiple virtual network functions (VNFs) in case of an undersubscribed and oversubscribed system, where the resource demands exceeds the physical resource capacity. Specifically, we use the Single Root Input Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) as our Input/Output (I/O) technology, and analyze the attainable throughput and delay when running multiple chained VNFs in a standard x86 server under various resource footprints and network features configurations. We show that the system throughput and delay in a multi-chained environment, offering multiple features, and under oversubscription can affect the overall performance of VNFs.
Highlights
Over the last decade, there has been a shift toward software-centric solutions in the space of network technologies
In this paper, we emphasize software-based solutions that can guarantee high performance without additional costs. We categorize these solutions according to the three axes of the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) deployment presented above, while we show the impact of the I/O technology used, to justify the selection of Single Root Input Output Virtualization (SR-IOV) as our principal I/O architecture
We analyzed the performance of running multiple VNFs under different chaining technologies, feature configurations, and oversubscription ratios using the SR-IOV as our primary
Summary
There has been a shift toward software-centric solutions in the space of network technologies. The key-enabled component that facilitates this shift is virtualization. Network functionalities could not escape this trend, introducing the concept of Network Function Virtualization (NFV). By its definition [1], NFV abstracts the network functionalities from the underlying dedicated and expensive hardware and offers them as software-images called Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). The main advantage of such an approach is that networking functions can be provisioned as typical. Virtual Machines (VMs) or Containers on top of custom-off-the-shelf (COTS) x86 servers. This approach promotes significant cost reductions, network agility, and increased operational efficiency
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