Switchboard: A Middleware for Wide-Area Service Chaining

Production networks are transitioning from the use of physical middleboxes to virtual network functions (VNFs), which makes it easy to construct highly-customized service chains of VNFs dynamically using software. Wide-area service chains are increasingly important given the emergence of heterogeneous execution platforms consisting of customer premise equipment (CPE), small edge cloud sites, and large centralized cloud data centers, since only part of the service chain can be deployed at the CPE and even the closest edge site may not always be able to process all the customers' traffic. Switchboard is a middleware for realizing and managing such an ecosystem of diverse VNFs and cloud platforms. It exploits principles from service-oriented architectures to treat VNFs as independent services, and provides a traffic routing platform shared by all VNFs. Moreover, Switchboard's global controller optimizes wide-area routes based on a holistic view of customer traffic as well as the resources available at VNFs and the underlying network. Switchboard globally optimized routes achieve up to 57% higher throughput and 49% lower latency than a distributed load balancing approach in a wide-area testbed. Its routing platform supports line-rate traffic with millions of concurrent flows.