Quality of Service Performance of Multi-Core Broadband Network Gateways
2024 (English)In: Proccedings of the 8th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA), IEEE, 2024Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
Broadband network access is typically managed by Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs), which can be implemented as a Virtual Network Function (VNF). This paradigm shift is caused by network softwarization and allows the BNG to be deployed on commodity hardware, significantly reducing capital expenditure (CAPEX). But packet processing operations and complex Quality of Service (QoS) policies make it difficult to provide low and predictable latency at scale for a large number of subscribers. To improve performance, parallel queues at the Network Interface Card (NIC) and multiple dedicated CPU cores for packet processing are used, processing 50 million packets per second on commodity x86 hardware. How to guarantee latency, however, remains unclear. In this study, we conducted testbed-based experiments on a VPP/DPDK implementation of the BNG to benchmark its performance. Our findings reveal how latency and its variation increase with background traffic, and we analyze a parameter that contributes to a trade-off between throughput and latency. We also examine the ability of the multi-core architecture to guarantee latency, at a cost of reduced port utilization. These observations influence the design goal of isolating subscriber traffic and highlight the suitability of software BNG for guaranteeing performance.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
IEEE, 2024.
Keywords [en]
benchmarking, BNG, DPDK, Performance measurements, Quality of Service, VPP, Broadband networks, Computer architecture, Cost reduction, Economic and social effects, Gateways (computer networks), Broadband network access, Broadband network gateway, Multi-cores, Packet processing, Performance, Quality of service performance, Quality-of-service, Virtual networks
National Category
Computer Sciences
Research subject
Computer Science
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-101212DOI: 10.23919/TMA62044.2024.10559123Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85197893635ISBN: 9783903176645 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-101212DiVA, id: diva2:1885223
Conference
TMA 2024 - 8th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference
2024-07-222024-07-222024-07-22Bibliographically approved