Toward Latency-Aware Dynamic Middlebox Scheduling

Under the current Internet environment, middlebox management has become a significant challenge for network operators. Schemes in prior works tried to simplify it with Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, and they provided reliable and flexible approaches to configure the middlebox-related flow entries. However, these schemes are inefficient in resource utilization with the dynamically changing traffic requirements, as they mainly focus on stationary hardware middleboxes. Further-more, latencies of packets lack controls under these schemes. In this paper, inspired by Network Function Virtualization (NFV), we employ software middleboxes, and build a processing delay model to formulate latency behaviours. And based on this model, we present a latency-aware NFV/SDN scheme called Quokka with portable software-based middleboxes that can be dynamically scheduled (placed) according to the changing traffic. Quokka controls the number of middleboxes by efficient and automatic scheduling of both traffic and middlebox positions, and thus reduces the transmission latencies of the network. Comprehensive experiments show: 1) compared with traditional configuration methods, Quokka reduces the transmission delay by about 20% on average; 2) Quokka requires 30% to 50% less middleboxes than traditional schemes to achieve the same performance.