With the ultimate goal of replacing proprietary hardware appliances with Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) implemented in software, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has been gaining popularity in the past few years. Software switches route traffic between VNFs and physical Network Interface Cards (NICs). It is of paramount importance to compare the performance of different switch designs and architectures. In this paper, we propose a methodology to compare fairly and comprehensively the performance of software switches. We first explore the design spaces of seven state-of-the-art software switches and then compare their performance under four representative test scenarios. Each scenario corresponds to a specific case of routing NFV traffic between NICs and/or VNFs. In our experiments, we evaluate the throughput and latency between VNFs in two of the most popular virtualization environments, namely virtual machines (VMs) and containers. Our experimental results show that no single software switch prevails in all scenarios. It is, therefore, crucial to choose the most suitable solution for the given use case. At the same time, the presented results and analysis provide a deeper insight into the design tradeoffs and identifies potential performance bottlenecks that could inspire new designs.

中文翻译：

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用于 NFV 的最先进软件交换机的性能基准测试

过去几年，网络功能虚拟化 (NFV) 的最终目标是用软件中实施的虚拟网络功能 (VNF) 取代专有硬件设备。软件交换机在 VNF 和物理网络接口卡 (NIC) 之间路由流量。比较不同交换机设计和架构的性能至关重要。在本文中，我们提出了一种方法来公平、全面地比较软件交换机的性能。我们首先探索了七个最先进的软件开关的设计空间，然后在四个代表性测试场景下比较它们的性能。每个场景对应于在 NIC 和/或 VNF 之间路由 NFV 流量的特定情况。在我们的实验中，我们评估了两个最流行的虚拟化环境中 VNF 之间的吞吐量和延迟，即虚拟机 (VM) 和容器。我们的实验结果表明，没有一个软件开关在所有场景中都占优势。因此，为给定的用例选择最合适的解决方案至关重要。同时，所呈现的结果和分析提供了对设计权衡的更深入洞察，并确定了可能激发新设计的潜在性能瓶颈。