The Latency Characteristics of GTP-U and SRv6 Stateless Translation on VPP Software Router

The software switches and routers are rapidly developed in the NFV/SDN area, and are expected to be adopted in the emerging future mobile network (beyond-5G). Despite the high expectation of software routers, its latency characteristics have not been investigated extensively. To provide the reference latency value for software-based network function, we analyzed the latency of SRv6 Mobile User Plane on VPP software router. We show that, 1) for the beyond-5G mobile network application, the latency is in the feasible range (roughly 3–30 μs), 2) the throughput is sufficient with the range in 1–5 Mpps per CPU core, 3) the latency has the strong correlation with the input traffic load, 4) and the latency can be stable in a carefully crafted implementation. The packet interval analysis shows the burstiness of its output traffic that is enforced by the processing of a vector (bulk/batch) of packets. Our latency characteristic analysis can be of help for improving the performance of software router using the batch processing and designing software-based beyond-5G mobile communication systems.