A Service-Based Testing Framework for NFV Platform Performance Evaluation

Availability was considered a critical factor of Network Function Virtualization(NFV) platforms. And many existing testing tools with fault injection features for NFV, only aim at availability, while now more and more attention have been paid to the performance degradation when failure happens. Moreover, performance data on hardware/software resources, like CPU consumption, memory usage, are required to collect in performance and fault-tolerant testing. To fulfill the requirements above, this paper proposes a service-based testing framework for NFV platform performance evaluation, under workloads and fault loads. By taking advantage of the Microservice Architecture, the proposed framework will integrate some existing open-source testing frameworks, including performance testing tools, fault injection tools, and monitoring tools, and build a more comprehensive testing scenario. A case study is conducted on Clearwater, a widely used open-source NFV application, to validate the efficiency and usability of the proposed framework.