A Closer Look at NFV Execution Models

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) advocates running service function chains (SFCs) on commodity servers as software, thereby providing a new level of flexibility to the deployment and management of network services. However, as we move from 10/40 Gbps to 100/400 Gbps line rates, it is challenging to build an NF execution framework that can deliver high performance at the maximum line speed using commodity servers, while providing scalability and flexibility afforded by software. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental problem of any NFV framework, i.e. how to execute SFCs on commodity servers by examining and comparing the performance of two execution models: the pipeline and run-to-completion models. In particular, we investigate how the multi-core server architecture affects the performance of SFC execution models by conducting extensive experiments on a testbed and shed new insights on the design and optimization of SFC execution models.