Software switching, a.k.a virtual switching, plays a vital role in network virtualization and network function virtualization, enhances configurability, and reduces deployment and operational costs. Software switching also facilitates the development of edge and fog computing networks by allowing the use of commodity hardware for both data processing and packet switching. Despite these benefits, characterizing and ensuring deterministic performance with software switches is harder, compared to physical switching appliances. In particular, achieving deterministic performance is essential to adopt software switching in mission-critical applications, especially those deployed in edge and fog computing architectures. In this paper, we study the impact of switch configurations on bandwidth slicing and predictable packet latency. We demonstrate that latency and predictability are dependent on the implementation of the bandwidth slicing mechanism and that the packet schedulers used in OVS Kernel-Path and OVS-DPDK each focus on different aspects of switching performance.
翻译:软件转换, a.k.a 虚拟转换,在网络虚拟化和网络功能虚拟化中发挥着关键作用,加强了配置,并降低了部署和运行成本。软件转换还便利了边缘和雾计算网络的发展,允许将商品硬件用于数据处理和包交换。尽管有这些好处,但软件开关的特征化和确保确定性性性工作比物理开关更难。特别是,实现确定性工作对于在任务关键应用程序中采用软件转换至关重要,特别是在边缘和雾计算结构中部署的应用程序。在本文中,我们研究了开关配置对带宽切换和可预测的包延时长的影响。我们证明,延时和可预测性取决于带宽切换机制的实施,而且OVS Kernel-Path和OVS-DPK所使用的包排程都侧重于转换性工作的不同方面。