Assessing the Performance of Virtualization Technologies for NFV: A Preliminary Benchmarking

The NFV paradigm transforms those applications executed for decades in dedicated appliances, into software images to be consolidated in standard server. Although NFV is implemented through cloud computing technologies (e.g., Virtual machines, virtual switches), the network traffic that such components have to handle in NFV is different than the traffic they process when used in a cloud computing scenario. Then, this paper provides a (preliminary) benchmarking of the widespread virtualization technologies when used in NFV, which means when they are exploited to run the so called virtual network functions and to chain them in order to create complex services.