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A Survey of Fast Packet I/O Technologies for Network Function Virtualization

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High Performance Computing (ISC High Performance 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 10524))

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Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims at bringing the benefits of virtualization to network middleboxes (routers, firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, ...). In the last few years the NFV use-case, initially hampered by the poor performance of traditional virtualized-I/O and network stacks, has prompted the design of several frameworks, all trying to provide a fast network for VMs and/or containers. These solutions share many common ideas, but also differ in performance, flexibility, portability, amount of specialized hardware required and/or software to be rewritten, attention to energy consumption issues, and so on. In this survey we focus on the NFV data-path, as opposed to the orthogonal control-path. We define a set of desirable features for NFV data-paths and use them to compare a selection of the most promising and/or widely used NFV frameworks. No single solution is optimal for all the features, so our survey may prompt for further research in this area.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although also traditional OSes are slowly evolving, e.g. Linux recently introduced support for batch transmission.

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Acknowledgements

This paper has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No. 644866. This paper reflects only the authors’ views and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Giuseppe Lettieri, Vincenzo Maffione & Luigi Rizzo

Authors
  1. Giuseppe Lettieri
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  2. Vincenzo Maffione
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  3. Luigi Rizzo
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Giuseppe Lettieri , Vincenzo Maffione or Luigi Rizzo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DKRZ), Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Julian M. Kunkel

  2. TITECH, Tokyo, Japan

    Rio Yokota

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, USA

    Michela Taufer

  4. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    John Shalf

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Lettieri, G., Maffione, V., Rizzo, L. (2017). A Survey of Fast Packet I/O Technologies for Network Function Virtualization. In: Kunkel, J., Yokota, R., Taufer, M., Shalf, J. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10524. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67630-2_40

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67630-2_40

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-67629-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-67630-2

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