In the Direction of Service Guarantees for Virtualized Network Functions

The trend of consolidating network functions from specialized hardware to software running on virtualization servers brings significant advantages for reducing costs and simplifying service deployment. However, virtualization techniques have significant limitations when it comes to networking as the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Wireless communications and mobile computing 2022-05, Vol.2022, p.1-16
Main Authors: Rathore, Muhammad Siraj, Ahmad, Naveed, Kohli, Rashi, Iqbal, Jawaid, Alroobaea, Roobaea, Hussain, Saddam, Ullah, Syed Sajid, Umar, Fazlullah
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Buckets
Clustering
Customer services
Linux
Performance evaluation
Routers
Scheduling
Servers
Software
Traffic control
Traffic flow
Virtual networks
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Summary:The trend of consolidating network functions from specialized hardware to software running on virtualization servers brings significant advantages for reducing costs and simplifying service deployment. However, virtualization techniques have significant limitations when it comes to networking as there is no support for guaranteeing that network functions meet their service requirements. In this paper, we present a design for providing service guarantees to virtualized network functions based on rate control. The design is a combination of rate regulation through token bucket filters and the regular scheduling mechanisms in operating systems. It has the attractive property that traffic profiles are maintained throughout a series of network functions, which makes it well suited for service function chaining. We discuss implementation alternatives for the design and demonstrate how it can be implemented on two virtualization platforms: LXC containers and the KVM hypervisor. To evaluate the design, we conduct experiments where we measure throughput and latency using IP forwarders (routers) as examples of virtual network functions. Two significant factors for performance are investigated: the design of token buckets and the packet clustering effect that comes from scheduling. Finally, we demonstrate how performance guarantees are achieved for rate-controlled virtual routers under different scenarios.
ISSN:1530-8669
1530-8677
DOI:10.1155/2022/5507845