Performance Improvement of EPC VNFs UtilisingBare Metal Provisioning

As the need for achieving virtualisation and softwarisation of network functions gains momentum, it is increasingly becoming important to ensure adequate performance for network operators. How a Virtual Network Function is designed, implemented, and placed over physical infrastructure can play a vital role on the performance metrics achieved by the network function. Not paying careful attention to this aspect could lead to the drastically reduced performance of network functions thus defeating the purpose of going for virtualisation solutions for network operators. In this paper, we identify the factors that greatly affect the performance of different categories of Virtual Network Functions of a mobile network operator and specifically focus on performance achieved in software acceleration architectures. The results show that baremetal EPC VNFs achieve greater performance over hypervisor supported EPC VNFs.