Performance evaluation of DPDK open vswitch with parallelization feature on multi-core platform

In recent years, SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualization) play important roles in the cloud computing datacenter. Open vSwitch is one of the popular open source software of Openflow switch. However, the performance degradation of Open vSwitch caused by processing smaller packets has been widely criticized. Open vSwitch implements OVS-DPDK version based on DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) and takes full advantage of the efficient characteristics provided by DPDK to improve the performance of packet processing. In this paper, we analyze the parallel performance of OVS-DPDK on the multi-core platform from two aspects of throughput and delay. We analyzed the impact of configuration parameters on the performance of ovs-dpdk, such as the length of the receiving queue, the number of active streams, and the number of cores. At the same time, the advantages and disadvantages of the load balancing strategy of OVS-DPDK parallel system are also analyzed. Finally, the reasonable configuration interval of the receiving queue and the optimal selection of the number of cores are obtained under the different number of active flows.