OpenNetVM: A platform for high performance network service chains

Abstract

Just as Software Defined Networking (SDN) research and product development was greatly accelerated with the release of several open source SDN platforms, we believe that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) research can see similar growth with the development of a flexible and efficient platform enabling high performance NFV implementations. Existing NFV research prototypes provide insufficient performance, flexibility, or isolation. Furthermore, high performance I/O platforms such as Intel's DPDK lack higher level abstractions. We present OpenNetVM, a highly efficient packet processing framework that greatly simplifies the development of network functions, as well as their management and optimization. OpenNetVM, based on the NetVM architecture, runs network functions in lightweight Docker containers that start in less than a second. The OpenNetVM platform manager provides load balancing, flexible flow management, and service name abstractions. OpenNetVM uses DPDK for high performance I/O, and efficiently routes packets through dynamically created service chains. Our evaluation achieves throughputs of 68 Gbps when load balancing across two NF replicas, and 40 Gbps when traversing a chain of five NFs, realizing the potential of deploying software services in production networks.