# Integrated SDN-NFV 5G Network Performance and Management-Complexity Evaluation
## 3 The Proposed Architecture
### Design  
In this study, the initial condition of the architecture in the data center was using SDN, but this SDN was still independent, so that the computing level below it was still running independently, as shown in Figure 4. The SDN used was the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). The computing level consists of the servers used to serve users.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline \hline \multicolumn{1}{c}{**Business Goals**} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Technical Goals**} \\ \hline \multirow{4}{*}{\(\bullet\)} & \multirow{4}{*}{Increase the user-experience of telecommunication company customers} & \(\bullet\) & Decreased latency on intra-service or inter-service data traffic based on virtualization. \\  & & & \\  & & & \\  & & & \\  & & & \\  & & & \\  & & & \\ \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Technical Goals to Business Goals Mapping.  
Figure 4: Independent SDN and computing system.  
On the server, many applications run either directly on the server or over the virtualization hypervisor. Hypervisor virtualization using VMware ESXi (Cisco: San Jose, CA, USA; VMware: Palo Alto, CA, USA). The applications are interconnected using the provided vSwitch standard [32], as shown in Figure 5.  
The following is a logical design that will be applied to telecommunications companies based on needs analysis and technical goals, as well as a literature review by the authors. The two switches above are spine and leaf SDN, which are commonly referred to in the unit, namely Fabric as shown in Figure 6. The endpoint devices attached to the leaf switch are servers with various functions, some of which function as SDN controllers, virtualization servers, network function virtualization computing servers, and external routers for external connections.  
Next, we provide a further explanation of the SDN topology that has been integrated with NFV. In this design, the SDN Controller (Cisco APIC) is integrated with the VMware  
Figure 5: vSphere standard switch architecture [25].  
Figure 6: Logical design of SDN and NFV.  
In addition, the implementation of DPDK and SR-IOV is carried out at the compute level, where each virtual machine is determined using one of these techniques to forward data packets. For virtual machines that have many north-south connections, SR-IOV is applied to the computing server because it uses hardware-based switching techniques and is not limited by Open vSwitch (OVS), which is a purely software-based solution [33]. For the east-west connection, DPDK is recommended because it does not utilize the physical NIC as depicted in Figure 8, where data traffic will not be forwarded until the physical NIC, which is the purpose of the data packet, is still on the same server (not different hardware) [12].  
The data plane development kit (DPDK) uses the kernel to process packets, which puts pressure on the kernel to process packets faster because the speed of the network interface card (NIC) increases [12]. We use the bypassing kernels method for efficient packet delivery. This feature involves processing packets in the user space instead of the kernel space; DPDK is one such technology. SR-IOV uses a technique to circumvent the hypervisor and has direct access to the NIC's virtual network function (VNF), allowing for increased throughput, as shown in Figure 9[33].  
Figure 8: DPDK architecture.  
Figure 7: The proposed integration of SDN controller with NFV controller and management service.  
The authors use a top-down approach to target staff at a higher level, such as a general manager, to understand the business goals and constraints of a manager to understand what the mapping presented in Table 3.