Performance of a software switch

Abstract

Software switching has been largely dismissed as an inefficient option compared to hardware switching, both in terms of cost and performance. Recent increases in processing power for commodity hardware has given reason to revisit software switching. The flexibility of a commodity hardware, software based platform allows us to rapidly create prototypes, while the increased performance of the hardware is starting to enable software based network devices to be used in production environments. Combining these two aspects of commodity hardware based switching has led us to create our own prototype implementation of a next generation frame forwarding protocol. In this paper, we detail the architecture of our implementation and compare the performance of Ethernet switching platforms to our implementation with a synthetic benchmark, designed to measure the maximum frame forwarding rate of the platforms. We explore the throughput characteristics of all platforms in single- and multi core configurations, while keeping the rest of the platform configuration as identical as possible.