DPDK-FQM: Framework for Queue Management Algorithms in DPDK

The advantages of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) have attracted many use cases ranging from virtual Customer Premises Equipment (vCPE) to virtual Radio Access Network (vRAN) and virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC). Fast packet processing libraries such as Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) are necessary to enable NFV. Currently, DPDK provides a framework for Quality of Service (QoS) which is used for queue management, traffic shaping and policing, but it lacks a general purpose queue management framework. In this paper, we propose DPDK-FQM, a framework to implement queue management algorithms in DPDK, run them and collect the desired statistics. Subsequently, we implement Proportional Integral controller Enhanced (PIE) and Controlled Delay (CoDel) queue management algorithms by using the proposed framework. We develop a new DPDK application to demonstrate the usage of APIs in DPDK-FQM, and verify the correctness of the framework and implementations of PIE and CoDel. Our experiments on a high speed network testbed show that PIE and CoDel exhibit their key characteristics by controlling the queue delay at a desired target, while fully utilizing the bottleneck bandwidth.