# Integrated SDN-NFV 5G Network Performance and Management-Complexity Evaluation
## 1 Introduction
From these three categories, user-space packet I/O removes the cost of packet transfer between the NIC and the host stack. This is an advantage for applications that run on it because it no longer requires high-level protocols processing (e.g., switch, routers, firewalls, etc.). Netmap, DPDK, mTCP, and IX are a type of User-space Packet I/O. DPDK is chosen because it uses more radical optimization techniques to pursue extreme packet I/O speed which is needed to improve packet processing performance [15]. Modifications are then made in the network part of computation, which is interfaces (PCI Express). This is also done as a way to improve the performance of the computing system to support the services running on it. SR-IOV was chosen because it specifies hardware enhancements that reduce the interactions between a hypervisor and a virtual machine (VM) in order to optimize the VM's data processing performance [16; 17]. 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. Therefore, we implemented all these architectures in the data center network environment and evaluated their performances and manageability. We used the Cisco application centric infrastructure (ACI) as the SDN infrastructure and the VMware TCI as the NFV infrastructure. Cisco ACI is an SDN data center infrastructure that is commonly used for creating a data center fabric [18]. Latency and throughput parameters are utilized as indicators of the network performance [19]. These parameters indicate the speed and reliability of the communication process while serving customers. Therefore, the main goal of this study was to prove that the application of DPDK and SR-IOV can improve the performance of SDN and NFV infrastructure integration by conducting traffic simulations and testing, and to prove that integration between SDN and NFV can simplify daily operational activities. We have succeeded in proving that integration between SDNand NFV is a convenient architecture for supporting 5G technology from simulation results, as will be clarified later. In this study, we focus on the integration between SDN and NFV to support 5G technology. This integration enables the acceleration of problem-solving time in various operational scenarios. In addition, we obtain network performance for data center network traffic. The main contributions of this study are summarized as follows. 1. An integrated SDN-NFV architecture to simplify network management activities. 2. Modification of the networking system at the computing level underlying NFV devices by replacing the default virtual switch with DPDK and SR-IOV. 3. The evaluation of proposed architecture compared to legacy architecture (SDN-only) in terms of network performance and manageability. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains the related work for this research and some related theories for strengthening our understanding before entering the next section. Section 3 clarifies the legacy architecture using the proposed architecture. Section 4 quantitatively compares the different network performances and manageability after integration between SDN and NFV. This proves that integration between SDN and NFV is the best choice for data center networks in with compliance with 5G technology. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper and highlights future work.