perfbench: A Tool for Predictability Analysis in Multi-Tenant Software-Defined Networks

Network Virtualization (NV) provides low resource costs and high utilization, while ensuring bandwidth isolation in the data plane. Software-Defined Networks (SDNs) are a particularly interesting technology to implement NV, as tenants maintain control over their virtual Software-Defined Networks (vSDNs). However, bandwidth isolation alone may not be enough to provide a predictable application performance in virtual networks, as the virtualization layer itself is another source of potential performance interference. Today, we lack tools that help reveal and investigate such sources of interference and identify performance inefficiencies. In order to fill this gap, we developed a new tool --- perfbench. We report on the tool design and our initial findings.