Comparative Evaluation of Kernel Bypass Mechanisms for High-performance Inter-container Communications

This work presents a framework for evaluating the performance of various virtual switching solutions, each widely adopted on Linux to provide virtual network connectivity to containers in high-performance scenarios, like in Network Function Virtualization (NFV). We present results from the use of this framework for the quantitative comparison of the performance of software-based and hardware-accelerated virtual switches on a real platform with respect to a number of key metrics, namely network throughput, latency and scalability.