Bubble: Lightweight Core Sharing in NFV

Haiping Wang, Zhilong Zheng, Chen Sun, Jun Bi

Abstract: Many researches have revealed the requirement of enabling multiple network functions (NFs) to share a CPU core in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) to support fine-grained NF models, efficient resource utilization, and chain consolidation. However, these works usually enable core sharing via kernel-level threads, which incurs significant performance degradation. In this paper, we present Bubble to enable lightweight core sharing in NFV. Bubble leverages user-level threads to eliminate the performance overhead introduced by kernel-level thread scheduling. Bubble is designed to satisfy unique requirements in NFV by providing accurate and low-overhead scheduling, in support of on- demand resource allocation, and accurate NF load measurement. Evaluations over a Bubble prototype implementation demonstrate that Bubble can improve the performance by 1.6Ã- to 6.2Ã- for co-located NFs and by 3.7Ã- to 68.8Ã- for a consolidated Service Function Chain (SFC) in a core against two state- of-the-art solutions.