Towards High-Performance Network Processing in Virtualized Environments

Abstract

Nowadays, network operators' amenities are populated with a huge amount of proprietary hardware devices for carrying out their core tasks. In this context, industry and academia have turned an eye to virtualization techniques to mitigate those effects and maximize potential earnings. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims to transform future network architectures by exploiting standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate a variety of network processing elements onto standard commodity servers. This work assesses the feasibility of moving high-performance network processing tasks to a virtualized environment. For such purpose, we analyse the possible configurations that allow feeding the network traffic to applications running inside virtual machines. We have given a set of guidelines that allow exploiting the functionality of generating virtual network functions, enabling a set of interesting scenarios and testing their performance bounds. We also developed HPCAPvf, a counterpart of HPCAP for virtual environments, and made it available under a GPL license.