A Survey of Fast Packet I/O Technologies for Network Function Virtualization

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims at bringing the benefits of virtualization to network middleboxes (routers, firewalls, Intrusion Detection Systems, ...). In the last few years the NFV use-case, initially hampered by the poor performance of traditional virtualized-I/O and network stacks, has prompted the design of several frameworks, all trying to provide a fast network for VMs and/or containers. These solutions share many common ideas, but also differ in performance, flexibility, portability, amount of specialized hardware required and/or software to be rewritten, attention to energy consumption issues, and so on. In this survey we focus on the NFV data-path, as opposed to the orthogonal control-path. We define a set of desirable features for NFV data-paths and use them to compare a selection of the most promising and/or widely used NFV frameworks. No single solution is optimal for all the features, so our survey may prompt for further research in this area.