Chaining-box: a transparent SFC architecture leveraging BPF

• Autor(a) principal: Matheus Salgueiro Castanho
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFMG
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/40984; https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-3412-0062
• topic: Service function chaining; Network function virtualization; Programmable networks; Computação - Teses; Virtualização de funções de rede - Teses; Redes programáveis - Teses; Encadeamento de funções de rede - Teses

The development and adoption of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has allowed great improvements in the way network services are deployed and managed by service providers. It has enabled the design of infrastructures more capable of responding to quick changes in demand due to the dynamic nature of traffic, while also providing reduction in management costs. In this setting, it is often required to compose different Service Functions (SF) in a sequential manner to create complex network services that operate on incoming traffic. Several approaches to handle this interconnection, also called Service Function Chaining (SFC), have been proposed in recent years, including high-performance implementations used in production systems. However, a careful analysis of these proposals shows that the separation of concerns between the service and data planes has not been among the main design objectives. As a consequence, the existing SFC architectures are tailor-made for specific environments and platforms, often relying on specialized or modified network devices, either in software or in hardware. This work proposes a new SFC architecture called Chaining-Box. It is based on a simple idea: integrating all functionality needed to provide SFC into each SF as a set of processing stages. This is done in a fully transparent manner, requiring little to no support from the underlying infrastructure and without any modifications to functions. The stages are implemented as BPF programs running inside a Linux kernel to provide all SFC actions as the packets traverse the kernel stack. Chaining-Box in detail, presenting its design and discussing how it compares to other existing SFC implementations, highlighting its advantages and also the disadvantages. An experimental analysis is also presented to demonstrate its applicability and the performance of the prototype implemented.