Performance Best Practices for 5G Data Plane Intensive CNFs

The performance of the data plane intensive CNF in a host depends on the compute and network capacity allocated to the CNF. The compute and network capacity requirements of the data plane intensive CNFs can vary based on the type of CNF.

• Network-bound CNFs: Some data plane intensive CNFs do simple packet forwarding. These CNFs are network bound and their throughput is limited by the allocated network capacity in the host.

• CPU-bound CNFs: In addition to packet forwarding, other data plane CNFs perform Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), filtering, heuristics, and so on. These data plane CNFs are CPU bound and their throughput is limited by the allocated compute capacity in the host.

The performance best practices for the data plane CNFs focus on the compute and network components in the following logical layers of VMware Telco Cloud Platform 5G Edition.

• Infrastructure Layer includes the physical compute, physical network, and the virtual compute provided by VMware vSphere^®.

• CaaS Layer includes the Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) layer built on top of the Infrastructure layer using VMware Tanzu™ Standard for Telco.