High-Performance and Low-Cost VPP Gateway for Virtual Cloud Networks

The virtual cloud network has been the first choice for most enterprises to expand local networks due to its convenience, flexibility, and elasticity. Cloud gateways are the key to steering traffic among these virtual networks, which require high throughput and low delay, usually in Tbps and microseconds (us), to improve the performance of cloud regions. However, as cloud traffic growth far exceeds Moore's law, previous software cloud gateways are facing the performance bottleneck that they are vulnerable to the attack of heavy-hitter flows. In this paper, we propose a high-performance and low-cost software cloud gateway for accelerating virtual cloud networks. By revisiting the Vector Packet Processing (VPP) framework, we design a custom control plane to enable various network functions of the cloud gateway, which enhances the routing and forwarding actions in the data plane. And we also provide a common interface for users to flexibly configure and manage the gateway. This pure software architecture has a low deployment cost. Compared with other software gateways with roughly the same price, the processing performance is close to the NIC's line speed, which is suitable for high concurrency cloud scenarios.