A Performance Evaluation Metric for NFV Elements on Multiple Timescales

Todays virtualization technologies are manifold and a comparison is hardly achievable. Thus, a metric independent from the virtualization technology is required to compare different systems. The metric is measurable in a passive way, hence, no artificial traffic has to be generated, and the virtualization system needs not to be modified. It evaluates the throughput of events on different time slices. This methodology, in contrast to existing jitter evaluations, enables the identification of critical timescales in the virtualization system. In this demonstration a proof-of-concept for a performance metric for NFV elements on multiple timescales is presented. In a reduced environment consisting of a single virtual router host the influences of hardware resource sharing and other impact factors (e.g. cpu, memory or disc load) are made visible. The demonstration gives an example of a performance degrease on smaller timescales, which can not be identified by a common throughput measurement over time. Thus, the presented metric enables to identify critical system conditions and can be used to optimize the scheduling of NFV, to compare different virtualization technologies, or to grade the performance for specific applications