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Enabling fast, dynamic network processing with clickOS

Published: 16 August 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Middleboxes are both crucial to today's networks and ubiquitous, but embed knowledge of today's protocols and applications to the detriment of those of tomorrow, making the network harder to evolve. SDNs seek to make it easier to extend the network with new functionality, but most of the research effort has focused on the network's control plane, that is, how packets are switched are routed through a SDN.
Given the pervasiveness and importance of middleboxes, we believe that a fully programmable network should also be able to dynamically instantiate and quickly move middlebox functionality. In this paper we shift focus towards making the data plane more programmable by introducing ClickOS, a tiny, Xen-based virtual machine that can run a wide range of middleboxes. ClickOS is small (5MB when running), can be instantiated in very small times (roughly 30 milliseconds) and can fill up a 10Gb pipe while concurrently running 128 vms on a low-cost commodity server.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HotSDN '13: Proceedings of the second ACM SIGCOMM workshop on Hot topics in software defined networking
    August 2013
    182 pages
    ISBN:9781450321785
    DOI:10.1145/2491185
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 16 August 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. clickos
    2. middleboxes
    3. nfv
    4. sdn
    5. virtualization
    6. xen

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    SIGCOMM'13
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    SIGCOMM'13: ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference
    August 16, 2013
    Hong Kong, China

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    HotSDN '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 38 of 84 submissions, 45%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 88 of 198 submissions, 44%

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    • (2022)Prism: Streamlined Packet Processing for Containers with Flow Prioritization2022 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)10.1109/ICDCS54860.2022.00040(336-346)Online publication date: Jul-2022
    • (2022)SDN Security Review: Threat Taxonomy, Implications, and Open ChallengesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.316897210(45820-45854)Online publication date: 2022
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