Improving the Safety, Scalability, and Efficiency of Network Function State Transfers

Abstract

Several frameworks have been proposed to orchestrate the transfer of internal state between network function (NF) instances. Unfortunately, these frameworks suffer from safety, efficiency, and scalability problems due to their excessive use of packet buffering. We propose two novel enhancements, packet reprocessing and peer-to-peer transfers, to address these issues. We show these enhancements reduce the average per-packet latency overhead by up to 92% and state transfer times by up to 70%.