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Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network Functions | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network Functions


Abstract:

Middleboxes are becoming indispensable in modern networks. However, programming the network stack of middleboxes to support emerging transport protocols and flexible stac...Show More

Abstract:

Middleboxes are becoming indispensable in modern networks. However, programming the network stack of middleboxes to support emerging transport protocols and flexible stack hierarchy is still a daunting task. To this end, we propose Rubik, a language that greatly facilitates the task of middlebox stack programming. Different from existing hand-written approaches, Rubik offers various high-level constructs for relieving the operators from dealing with massive native code, so that they can focus on specifying their processing intents. We show that using Rubik one can program the middlebox stack with minor effort, e.g., 250 lines of code for a complete TCP/IP stack, which is a reduction of 2 orders of magnitude compared to the hand-written versions. To maintain a high performance, we conduct extensive optimizations at the middle- and back-end of the compiler. Experiments show that the stacks generated by Rubik outperform the mature hand-written stacks by at least 30% in throughput.
Published in: IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking ( Volume: 32, Issue: 2, April 2024)
Page(s): 971 - 986
Date of Publication: 06 October 2023

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