Performance evaluation of an HTTP proxy implemented as a virtual network function

Autor: Rodrigo S. Couto, Rodrigo S. V. Eiras, Marcelo G. Rubinstein
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Annals of Telecommunications. 77:611-619
ISSN: 1958-9395
0003-4347
DOI: 10.1007/s12243-021-00886-4
Popis: Network functions virtualization (NFV) is an important approach in the telecommunications industry. One of the main features of NFV is the execution of network functions in software rather than using specific hardware. These functions can run on virtualization platforms, which can increase service elasticity and reduce infrastructure costs. However, virtualization imposes performance penalties, which can severely impact NFV services. In this work, we analyze this performance impact when the virtualized network function is an HTTP proxy. We then compare two virtualization solutions, i.e., KVM and Docker, under different configurations. Our results show that Docker containers yield performance close to that of native Linux for HTTP proxies since Docker does not employ a hypervisor. We show that KVM incurs a severe performance penalty, which a paravirtualization approach can reduce. We also evaluate how much load balancing in Docker can improve the performance of virtual proxies. We show that, for our scenario, two parallel proxies significantly improve performance. However, we observe a negative impact when increasing the number of proxies since they interfere with each other.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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