Towards high performance packet processing for 5G

Network Functions Virtualization aims to implement networking functions in the cloud — even the ones working on the user plane. This is envisioned by decomposing today's monolithic devices into smaller functions and re-composing them real-time. This enables flexibility and independent innovation, but may come at a performance price. In this paper we investigate the performance aspects of composing user plane functions. We have developed a prototype for mobile service chaining to experiment with the function call based composition method provided by the Click modular router. The prototype allows flexible management of feature sets, including the support for relocating user chains using context transfer. We provide a thorough performance evaluation, draw conclusions and propose a versatile execution environment, which combines various composition and processing methods in order to achieve high performance packet processing for 5G networks.