In our upcoming NSDI 2018 paper, we focus on how to realize high performance NFV service chains at the true speed of the underlying hardware. We solve this challenging problem by exploiting the synergy between available network resources (i.e., programmable switches and network cards) and commodity servers, while eliminating inter-core communication among the service chain components. We demonstrate, via 40-Gbps and 100-Gbps experiments, that our approach achieves: (i) 2.75-6.5x better efficiency, (ii) up to 4.7x lower latency, and (iii) up to 7.8x higher throughput than the state of the art.
Credits
This is a joint work with Georgios P. Katsikas (RISE SICS Network Intelligence group), Tom Barbette (University of Liege), Dejan Kostic (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Rebecca Steinert (RISE SICS Network Intelligence group), and Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). The full abstract is as follows:
Abstract
In this paper we present Metron, a Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) platform that achieves high resource utilization by jointly exploiting the underlying network and commodity servers’ resources. This synergy allows Metron to: (i) offload part of the packet processing logic to the network, (ii) use smart tagging to setup and exploit the affinity of traffic classes, and (iii) use tag-based hardware dispatching to carry out the remaining packet processing at the speed of the servers’ fastest cache(s), with zero inter-core communication. Metron also introduces a novel resource allocation scheme that minimizes the resource allocation overhead for large-scale NFV deployments. With commodity hardware assistance, Metron deeply inspects traffic at 40 Gbps and realizes stateful network functions at the speed of a 100 GbE network card on a single server. Metron has 2.75-6.5x better efficiency than OpenBox, a state of the art NFV system, while ensuring key requirements such as elasticity, fine-grained load balancing, and flexible traffic steering.