{"title":"Adaptive Service-Chain Routing for Virtual Network Functions in Software-Defined Networks","authors":"Abhishek Dwaraki, T. Wolf","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940148","url":null,"abstract":"Software-defined networking is shifting data communication networks toward more centralized control. The availability of virtual machines and lightweight containers enables dynamic placement of virtual network functions on demand. A key challenge is to efficiently route service-chain requests and place processing functions in a network under operational constraints. We present a novel method of solving the node-constrained service chain routing problem in a software-defined network. The main idea is to transform the network representation to a layered graph that considers processing steps and allows the use of conventional shortest-path algorithms, such as Dijkstra's algorithm, to solve the problem. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through an emulated prototype implementation that uses dynamic utilization measurements on links and hosts to determine network conditions at runtime.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124492163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Datacenter Scale Load Balancing for Multipath Transport","authors":"V. Olteanu, C. Raiciu","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940154","url":null,"abstract":"Multipath TCP traffic is on the rise with recent deployments by Apple and Samsung on mobile phones. Despite this, MPTCP adoption on servers is falling behind and the major problem is that Multipath TCP does not work with existing datacenter load balancers. In this work we present MPLB, a distributed load balancer for Multipath TCP traffic. MPLB uses stateless software multiplexers to direct traffic to backend servers and is resilient to mux and network failures, as well as backend server churn. We have implemented and tested MPLB, finding it can handle 6Mpps per machine with minimum-sized packets, seamlessly scale-out or in and gracefully handle mux failures.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"336 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133796510","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Laufer, Massimo Gallo, Diego Perino, Anandatirtha Nandugudi
{"title":"CliMB: Enabling Network Function Composition with Click Middleboxes","authors":"R. Laufer, Massimo Gallo, Diego Perino, Anandatirtha Nandugudi","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940152","url":null,"abstract":"Click has significant advantages for middlebox development, including modularity, extensibility, and reprogrammability. Despite these features, Click still has no native TCP support and only uses nonblocking I/O, preventing its applicability to middleboxes that require access to L7 data and blocking I/O. We bridge this gap by introducing Click middleboxes (CliMB). CliMB provides a full-fledged modular TCP layer supporting congestion control, TCP options, both blocking and nonblocking I/O, as well as socket and zero-copy APIs to applications. As a result, any TCP network function may now be realized in Click. As proof of concept, we develop a zero-copy SOCKS proxy server using CliMB that shows up to 4x gains compared to an equivalent implementation using the Linux in-kernel network stack.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130089670","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Light at the middle of the tunnel: middleboxes for selective disclosure of network monitoring to distrusted parties","authors":"Nikolai Sultana, Markulf Kohlweiss, A. Moore","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940151","url":null,"abstract":"Network monitoring is vital to the administration and operation of networks, but it requires privileged access that only highly trusted parties are granted. This severely limits the opportunity for external parties, such as service or equipment providers, auditors, or even clients, to measure the health or operation of a network in which they are stakeholders, but do not have access to its internal structure. In this position paper we propose the use of middleboxes to open up network monitoring to external parties using privacy-preserving technology. This will allow distrusted parties to make more inferences about the network state than currently possible, without learning any precise information about the network or the data that crosses it. Thus the state of the network will be more transparent to external stakeholders, who will be empowered to verify claims made by network operators. Network operators will be able to provide more information about their network without compromising security or privacy.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"299 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116322518","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Junaid Khalid, Mark Coatsworth, Aaron Gember, Aditya Akella
{"title":"A Standardized Southbound API for VNF Management","authors":"Junaid Khalid, Mark Coatsworth, Aaron Gember, Aditya Akella","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940156","url":null,"abstract":"Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offers network operators great flexibility toward managing network functions, i.e. in-network appliances such as firewalls, load balancers and NATs. Several frameworks exist to this end; however VNF management is fragmented, and no standard management API exists. As a result, each framework uses a proprietary API which a network function must support to fully realize its benefits. This lack of standardization is a major barrier in the wider adoption of NFV. We propose a standard, framework-agnostic southbound API to facilitate faster adoption of NFV and enable innovation in the design of both management frameworks and network functions.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"139 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129882555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Measurement Based Fair Queuing for Allocating Bandwidth to Virtual Machines","authors":"K. To, D. Firestone, G. Varghese, J. Padhye","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940153","url":null,"abstract":"We wish to allocate outgoing bandwidth at a server among customer VMs. The allocation for each VM is proportional to the bandwidth purchased for that VM by the customer, while allowing idle bandwidth to redistributed. Classical fair queuing in routers assumes tight feedback between transmitter and scheduler, and that cheap scheduler invocation on every transmission. Since these assumptions are false in Virtual Switches, we propose MBFQ (Measurement Based Fair Queuing) with two levels of scheduling: a microscheduler that operates cheaply and paces VM transmissions, and a macroscheduler that periodically redistributes tokens to microschedulers based on the measured bandwidth of VMs. We show that MBFQ allows a VM to obtain its allocated bandwidth in X scheduling intervals, and that idle bandwidth is reclaimed within Y periods. An implementation of MBFQ is available in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"353 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115922433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Wei Zhang, Guyue Liu, Wenhui Zhang, Neel Shah, Phil Lopreiato, Grégoire Todeschi, K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood
{"title":"OpenNetVM: A Platform for High Performance Network Service Chains","authors":"Wei Zhang, Guyue Liu, Wenhui Zhang, Neel Shah, Phil Lopreiato, Grégoire Todeschi, K. Ramakrishnan, Timothy Wood","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940155","url":null,"abstract":"Network middleboxes are growing in number and diversity. Middleboxes have been deployed widely to complement the basic end-to-end functionality provided by the Internet Protocol suite that depends only on the minimal functionality of a best-effort network layer. The move from purpose-built hardware middleboxes to software appliances running in virtual machines provides much needed deployment flexibility, but significant challenges remain. Just as Software Defined Networking (SDN) research and product development was greatly accelerated with the release of several open source SDN platforms, we believe that Network Function Virtualization (NFV) research can see similar growth with the development of a flexible platform that enables high performance NFV prototypes. Towards this end we have been building OpenNetVM, an efficient packet processing framework that greatly simplifies the development of network functions, as well as research into their management and optimization. OpenNetVM runs network functions in lightweight Docker containers, enabling fast startup and reducing memory overheads. The OpenNetVM platform manager provides load balancing, flexible flow management, and service name abstractions. OpenNetVM efficiently routes packets through dynamically created service chains, achieving throughputs of 10 Gbps even when traversing a chain of 6 NFs. In this paper we describe our architecture and evaluate its performance compared to existing NFV platforms.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"2013 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121516612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
G. Siracusano, R. Bifulco, Simon Kuenzer, S. Salsano, N. Blefari-Melazzi, Felipe Huici
{"title":"On the Fly TCP Acceleration with Miniproxy","authors":"G. Siracusano, R. Bifulco, Simon Kuenzer, S. Salsano, N. Blefari-Melazzi, Felipe Huici","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940149","url":null,"abstract":"TCP proxies are basic building blocks for many advanced middleboxes. In this paper we present Miniproxy, a TCP proxy built on top of a specialized minimalistic cloud operating system. Miniproxy's connection handling performance is comparable to that of full-fledged GNU/Linux TCP proxy implementations, but its minimalistic footprint enables new use cases. Specifically, Miniproxy requires as little as 6 MB to run and boots in tens of milliseconds, enabling massive consolidation, on-the-fly instantiation and edge cloud computing scenarios. We demonstrate the benefits of Miniproxy by implementing and evaluating a TCP acceleration use case.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133991271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
H. Asghar, Luca Melis, Cyril Soldani, Emiliano De Cristofaro, M. Kâafar, L. Mathy
{"title":"SplitBox: Toward Efficient Private Network Function Virtualization","authors":"H. Asghar, Luca Melis, Cyril Soldani, Emiliano De Cristofaro, M. Kâafar, L. Mathy","doi":"10.1145/2940147.2940150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/2940147.2940150","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents SplitBox, an efficient system for privacy-preserving processing of network functions that are outsourced as software processes to the cloud. Specifically, cloud providers processing the network functions do not learn the network policies instructing how the functions are to be processed. First, we propose an abstract model of a generic network function based on match-action pairs. We assume that this function is processed in a distributed manner by multiple honest-but-curious cloud service providers. Then, we introduce our SplitBox system for private network function virtualization and present a proof-of-concept implementation on FastClick, an extension of the Click modular router, using a firewall as a use case. Our experimental results achieve a throughput of over 2 Gbps with 1 kB-sized packets on average, traversing up to 60 firewall rules.","PeriodicalId":187388,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2016 workshop on Hot topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125460470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}