Demystifying the energy efficiency of Network Function Virtualization

Middleboxes are prevalent in today's enterprise and data center networks. Network function virtualization (NFV) is a promising technology to replace dedicated hardware middleboxes with virtualized network functions (VNFs) running on commodity servers. However, no prior study has examined the energy efficiency of different NFV implementations. In this paper, we conduct a measurement study on the power efficiency of software data planes, the virtual I/O and the software middleboxes, which are important parts of the NFV implementations. We run two popular software middleboxes (Snort and Bro) on three common software data planes (i.e., DPDK-OVS, Click Modular Router and Netmap). Our results show significant differences on power among those different NFV implementations. We analyze the underlying design choices and give implications on how to build more power efficient NFV implementations.