SNF: synthesizing high performance NFV service chains

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. Subjects Computer Networks and Communications

Letting off STEAM: Distributed Runtime Traffic Scheduling for Service Function Chaining

“…(3) Scheduling decisions are made at packet-level vs flow-level, making our solution more adaptive to traffic dynamics. Some recent works [31], [49]- [51] consider optimizations and scheduling at the level of a single server or CPU core. In particular, NFVnice is a VNF framework for CPUs that aims for fair and efficient resource allocation of chains, considering the impact of different VNFs on resource usage.…”

Make the Most out of Last Level Cache in Intel Processors

“…In addition to user-space I/O frameworks, there have also been efforts to optimize the kernel network stack [18,22,59]. Additionally, several efforts have been made to improve NFV application performance when running over user-space I/O frameworks [8,16,33,34,62,68,86]. Furthermore, there are a limited number of works that employed CAT to mitigate noisy neighbor effect and improve NFV performance [70,72,73].…”

Rss++

“…Metron [25] translates service chains' traffic classes (synthesized by SNF [26]) to NIC or OpenFlow classification rules (see Figure 4c). We refer to this method as traffic-class based in Table 1 and Figure 4b.…”

“…low latency. Recent developments in key-value stores [9,21,22,33,39], Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) [25,26], network stacks [12,19,49,60], and high-speed networking platforms [4,15,48] all advocate the use of sharding. Sharding divides resources (e.g., CPU cores and memory) into multiple shards that process requests in parallel, in a totally independent way.…”