FlowOS: a flow-based platform for middleboxes

Abstract

Middleboxes are heavily used in the Internet to process the network traffic for a specific purpose. As there is no open standards, these proprietary boxes are expensive and difficult to upgrade. In this paper, we present a programmable platform for middleboxes called FlowOS to run on commodity hardware. It provides an elegant programming model for writing flow processing software, which hides the complexities of low-level packet processing, process synchronisation, and inter-process communication. We show that FlowOS itself does not add any significant overhead to flows by presenting some preliminary test results.