NFV Performance Profiling on Multi-core Servers

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) lays the foundation for future networking. In this paper we attempt to provide an in-depth analysis of NFV performance, namely, how many packets a single CPU core can process, and in particular, whether and when packet processing performance will scale linearly with the number of cores. Understanding these questions is important given the limited server capacities in a (mobile) edge cloud. Through careful and extensive performance measurement, we demonstrate server microprocessor architecture has an enormous impact on NFV performance, and interplay among the NF state, operations and workload characteristics in a service function chain (SFC) further compounds the problem. We develop a systematic profiling model for benchmarking and estimating NFV/SFC performance under diverse traffic demands.