A High-Performance OpenFlow Software Switch

Software switches offer flexibility to service providers but potentially suffer from low performance. A software switch called Lagopus was implemented using Intel's Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which offers libraries for high-performance packet handling. Prior work on software switches focused on characterizing packet forwarding throughput. In this work, we evaluated the impact of certain parameters and settings in Lagopus on application performance and studied packet drop rates. The importance of receive-thread packet classification for load balancing and to send delay-sensitive flows to a different worker thread from high-throughput flows was first demonstrated. Next, we showed that a loop-count variable used to control packet batching should be kept small in case link utilization is low. Finally, we showed that packet drop rate could be non-zero when the OpenFlow table size is large and packet arrival rate is high, and interestingly, the packet drop rate was higher with four worker threads than with a single worker thread. This implies a need for careful calibration and planning of the parameters of parallelization.