Supporting Fine-Grained Network Functions through Intel DPDK

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) aims to transform network functions into software images, executed on standard, high-volume hardware. This paper focuses on the case in which a massive number of (tiny) network function instances are executed simultaneously on the same server and presents our experience in the design of the components that move the traffic across those functions, based on the primitives offered by the Intel DPDK framework. This paper proposes different possible architectures, it characterizes the resulting implementations, and it evaluates their applicability under different constraints.