Enabling Efficient Network Service Function Chain Deployment on Heterogeneous Server Platform

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) aims to run software-implemented network functions on general hardware such as Commodity Off-the-Shelf (COTS) servers to trade the application-specific performance with generality and re-configurability. Nevertheless, with the wide adoption of general accelerators such as GPU, the researchers seek to boost the performance of software-based network functions while trying to maintain the reusability and programmability in the meantime. The Service Function Chain (SFC) is a key enabler of service flexibility of NFV. The network functions stitch into a chain to provide differentiated services to multi-tenants. However, our characterization results show that existing heterogeneous packet processing frameworks do not handle NFV SFC well since two new overheads, the aggregated processing overheads and co-existence interference overheads, are introduced by SFC.,,,, Motivated by our characterization, we propose NFCompass, a runtime framework that employs SFC re-organization technique and graph-partition based task scheduling technique to conquer the two challenges brought by SFC. By re-organizing the SFC components, the length and complexity of processing paths are reduced and the aggregated overheads are mitigated. By applying the graph-partition based task allocation, better load balance is achieved and the data transfer overheads are considerably reduced.