SNSVS: Scalable Network Slicing with Virtualized Systems using Post-Quantum Cryptography

Modern network infrastructures face increasing demands for scalability, performance, and security, particularly in multi-tenant environments. Ensuring efficient traffic isolation and secure communication across multiple virtualized systems is a critical challenge, especially when dealing with high-throughput applications. In this paper, we address these challenges by leveraging SR-IOV-based virtualization to create isolated network slices and establishing secure communication channels, using Kyber and Dilithium (ML-KEM/ML-DSA) and IPsec tunnels. We connect 16 Virtual Machines (VMs) and another host system on a direct link. We reach a total of 71.79Gbit/s on the 100Gbit/s NVIDIA BlueField-2 Data Processing Unit (DPU), by configuring the OpenvSwitch (OvS) for steering the traffic on its ARM cores, and testing using multiple instances of iPerf3 on all the (v)hosts. This result represents a 95.36% utilization of the baseline network performance.