Toward High-Performance and Scalable Network Functions Virtualization

Network functions virtualization (NFV) promises to bring significant flexibility and cost savings to networking. These improvements are predicated on being able to run many virtualized network elements on a server, which leads to a fundamental question on how scalable an NFV platform can be. With this in mind, the authors build an experimental platform with commonly used NFV technologies. They evaluate the NFVs performance and scalability and, based on their demonstrated improvements, discuss best practices for achieving optimum NFV performance on commodity hardware. They also reveal the limitations on NFV scalability and propose a new architecture to address them.