SNF: Synthesizing high performance NFV service chains

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1 Department of Communication Systems (CoS), School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Kista, Stockholm, Sweden
2 Network and Computer Science Department (INFRES), Telecom ParisTech, Paris, France
3 Paris Innovation and Research Laboratory (PIRL), Cisco Systems, Paris, France
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2477v3
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Computer Networks and Communications
Keywords
NFV, service chains, synthesis, single-read-single-write, line-rate, 40 Gbps
Copyright
© 2016 Katsikas et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Katsikas GP, Enguehard M, Kuźniar M, Maguire Jr. GQ, Kostić D. 2016. SNF: Synthesizing high performance NFV service chains. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2477v3

Abstract

In this paper we introduce SNF, a framework that synthesizes (S) network function (NF) service chains by eliminating redundant I/O and repeated elements, while consolidating stateful cross layer packet operations across the chain. SNF uses graph composition and set theory to determine traffic classes handled by a service chain composed of multiple elements. It then synthesizes each traffic class using a minimal set of new elements that apply single-read-single-write and early-discard operations.

Our SNF prototype takes a baseline state-of-the-art network functions virtualization (NFV) framework to the level of performance required for practical NFV service deployments. Software-based SNF realizes long (up to 10 NFs) and stateful service chains that achieve line-rate 40 Gbps throughput (up to 8.5x greater than the baseline NFV framework). Hardware-assisted SNF, using a commodity OpenFlow switch, shows that our approach scales at 40 Gbps for Internet Service Provider-level NFV deployments.

Author Comment

Some parts of the article are rephrased and a couple of typos are fixed.