DPDK Open vSwitch performance validation with mirroring feature

Abstract

International audienceNetwork Function Visualization (NFV) and Software Defined Network (SDN) currently play a key role to transform the network architecture from hardware-based to software-based. Along with cloud computing, NFV and SDN are moving network functions from dedicated hardware to software implementation (Virtual Network Functions - VNF), on Virtual Machine (VM) or other virtualization technology such as containers, on top of a virtualized platform in the Cloud. To connect the VNFs, hosted in the same Data Center (DC) or across multiple DCs, virtual switches are required. Besides forwarding functions, virtual switches can be configured to mirror traffics for network management needs. Among the existing virtual switch solutions, Open vSwitch (OVS) is the most known and used. OVS is open source, and included in most of the existing Linux distributions. However, OVS performance in terms of throughput for smaller packets is very smaller than of line rate of the interface. To overcome this limitation, OVS was ported to Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), namely OVDK. The latter achieves an impressive line rate throughput across physical interfaces. In this paper, we present the result of OVDK performance test when flow and port mirroring are activated, which was not tested so far. The performance test focuses on two parameters, throughput and latency in OVDK; allowing to validate the use of OVDK for flow forwarding and network management in the envisioned virtualized network architecture

Diagnostic and troubleshooting of OpenFlow‐enabled switches using kernel and userspace traces

“…As future work, we plan to extend this framework by supporting OVS‐DPDK. Many studies have shown that the performance of OVS increases when DPDK is used as a userspace datapath 36 . Our tool would be more versatile if it could evaluate the performance of an SDN network, where many types of datapaths (kernel, userspace, and hardware) are used.…”

Predictable Bandwidth Slicing with Open vSwitch

“…He et al [14] evaluate a software switch bandwidth slicing mechanism; however, their tests were performed in simple scenarios and their results are presented without a thorough analysis of the latency values. The same shortcoming is exhibited in [10]- [13] in terms of latency evaluation: their models of packet latency are for simple, synthetic testing scenarios. The latency of a single flow has been evaluated in [10]- [12], while [13] only evaluates the latency of a single packet.…”

Transparent Redirections in Content Delivery Networks

“…The userspace implementation of the forwarding datapath called ovs-switchd and the datapath kernel module written specifically for the host operating system to achieve high performance [29]. The performance of the Open vSwitch kernel datapath reaches up to 800 Mbit/s [30] on a single UDP flow tested, which can be further enhanced by using a different datapath, e.g., DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) [31] or a hardware implementation. We modified the Open vSwitch open source software implemented forwarder, which currently handles OpenFlow up to version 1.5.…”