The killer features of the next-generation 5G mobile standard, including mobile edge computing and network slicing, will be very difficult to support with traditional fixed-function network appliances. Rather, the 5G core will depend on programmable switches, which allow packet processing functionality to be reconfigured on the fly in order to deploy virtualized network functions and service chains instantaneously. With 5G on the close horizon, it has become crucial to identify the price for programmability in the software data plane, considering the expected complexity and scale of the next-generation mobile core. In this paper, we report on a multi-year data-plane scalability study we have conducted for a large mobile vendor. Our results paint a rather pessimistic picture on the current landscape of the programmable software data plane. We find that the prominent programmable switches either do not provide all the features necessary to implement 5G telco pipelines efficiently or struggle to meet the scale, and the performance operators have come to expect from conventional fixed-function appliances. The only exception, ESwitch, remains proprietary. We call for further work on data-plane scalability and sketch some directions for future research.

HTTP has been the protocol for transferring web traffic over the Internet since the 90s. However, over the past 20 years websites have evolved so much that today this protocol does not provide optimal delivery over the Internet and became a bottleneck in decreasing page load times. Google is pioneering in finding better solutions for downloading web pages and they implemented two new protocols: SPDY in 2009 and QUIC in 2013. Since the wide range deployment of SPDY clients and servers it has been revealed that in some scenarios SPDY can negatively affect the page transfer time mainly due to the fact that the protocol is working over TCP. To tackle these obstacles QUIC uses its own congestion control and based on UDP in the transport layer. Since QUIC is a very recent protocol, this paper could help further understand its operation and performance in a wide range of network scenarios. We present a comprehensive study about the performance of QUIC, SPDY and HTTP particularly about how they affect page load time. We found that none of these protocols is clearly better than the other two and the actual network conditions determine which protocol performs the best.

We present the versatile functionality of our novel user behavior based traffic emulation system in this paper. We show the unique feature of the system, i. e., it is capable of working on different platforms (Windows, Android), on different access technologies (wired, WiFi, 3G) and as a remote controlled system on different sites (Europe, Asia, South America). Our examples exhibit some of the manifold traffic analysis possibilities as a result of this key functionality. We have also made our system available to the public [1].