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 (? 25 s) 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 ? 100 s) 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.