Performance Comparison of IP Packet Forwarding Solutions

Nowadays we know several IP packet forwarding solutions, and they are getting faster and more efficient. We chose Fast Data Project / Vector Packet Processing (FD.io VPP) for our investigation, because it is regarded as an extremely high speed and secure networking data plane. In this paper, we present how to install and configure FD.io VPP and we also demonstrate its high IP packet forwarding performance compared to that of the Linux kernel. To achieve this, we built a testbed using two Dell PowerEdge R620 servers. One of the servers was the Tester and the siitperf measurement software was used for executing IPv4 and IPv6 packet forwarding performance tests. The other server was the DUT (Device Under Test), on which FD.io VPP was installed and its packet forwarding performance was measured. As a basis for comparison, we also measured the packet forwarding performance of the Linux kernel. It was found that FD.io VPP seriously outperformed the Linux kernel. The details of the measurements and their results are disclosed and analyzed in the paper.