Building Network Function Virtualization Platform Based On Linux Container

More and more network middleboxes are employed into the network, however, the current middleboxes are mainly hardware-based, and always expensive and difficult to be deployed, managed and upgraded. Moreover, the shorter lifecycles of hardware and the quicker innovation of services even make the cost of network infrastructure enlarge. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims to tackle these problems. In NFV, the network operators built networks by evolving standard IT virtualization technology to consolidate many network equipment types onto industry standard x86 server. Running the implementation of network functions in software on a range of industry standard server can decouple the network functions and hardware, and then can realize the flexible deployment and management of network function, and reducing equipment investment cost.At present, the industry and academia are mostly based on virtual machine technology (such as XEN, KVM) to build a NFV platform. This method has the advantages of good isolation and easy migration, but also disadvantages like much resource consumption in virtual machine. Container is a kind of lightweight operating system virtualization technology, it has a large resource cost advantage in the occasion which the virtual network function is not required to migrate.This dissertation is based on Linux container technology, and achieve a NFV platform combined with Click software architecture. For the NFV platform problems exist in the input/output of packets, communication between containers and service chains scheduling, this dissertation proposes corresponding solutions. And optimize the NFV platform by using advanced packets input/output engine, zero copy technology based on shared memory and NUMA aware service chains dynamic binding technology.This dissertation has tested all above optimizing techniques and get their performance on the real hardware platform, evaluated the NFV platform's performance and scalability, and compared the performance of a simulating home gateway of NFV platform to a NFV platform based on the KVM. The experiment shows that the NFV platform has a better performance in supporting the rapid development of virtual network and the system throughput.The experimental results show that the NFV platform has a better performance in supporting the rapid development of virtual network functions and the system throughput.