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NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV

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Hongxin HuAuthors Info & Claims

SIGCOMM '17: Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Pages 43 - 56

https://doi.org/10.1145/3098822.3098826

Published: 07 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Software-based sequential service chains in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) could introduce significant performance overhead. Current acceleration efforts for NFV mainly target on optimizing each component of the sequential service chain. However, based on the statistics from real world enterprise networks, we observe that 53.8% network function (NF) pairs can work in parallel. In particular, 41.5% NF pairs can be parallelized without causing extra resource overhead. In this paper, we present NFP, a high performance framework, that innovatively enables network function parallelism to improve NFV performance. NFP consists of three logical components. First, NFP provides a policy specification scheme for operators to intuitively describe sequential or parallel NF chaining intents. Second, NFP orchestrator intelligently identifies NF dependency and automatically compiles the policies into high performance service graphs. Third, NFP infrastructure performs light-weight packet copying, distributed parallel packet delivery, and load-balanced merging of packet copies to support NF parallelism. We implement an NFP prototype based on DPDK in Linux containers. Our evaluation results show that NFP achieves significant latency reduction for real world service chains.

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Sharma SJukan AMalik AGumaste A(2024)A Network Calculus Model for SFC Realization and Traffic Bounds Estimation in Data CentersACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/370044024:4(1-32)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
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Index Terms

NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV
1. Networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGCOMM '17: Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

August 2017

515 pages

ISBN:9781450346535

DOI:10.1145/3098822

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Published: 07 August 2017

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August 21 - 25, 2017

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Cited By

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https://doi.org/10.1109/COMSNETS63942.2025.10885733
Sharma SJukan AMalik AGumaste A(2024)A Network Calculus Model for SFC Realization and Traffic Bounds Estimation in Data CentersACM Transactions on Internet Technology10.1145/370044024:4(1-32)Online publication date: 18-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3700440
Chen XXiao QLiu HHuang QZhang DLiu XHu LZhou HWu CRen KSekar VYu MSeneviratne AVeitch D(2024)Eagle: Toward Scalable and Near-Optimal Network-Wide Sketch Deployment in Network MeasurementProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2024 Conference10.1145/3651890.3672244(291-310)Online publication date: 4-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3651890.3672244
Lin WShan YKosta RKrishnamurthy AZhang YZhang ZPutnam A(2024)SuperNIC: An FPGA-Based, Cloud-Oriented SmartNICProceedings of the 2024 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays10.1145/3626202.3637564(130-141)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2024
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Zhang KHong JHe ZJing YWang X(2024)AdaptChain: Adaptive Data Sharing and Synchronization for NFV Systems on Heterogeneous ArchitecturesIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2024.340059435:7(1281-1292)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
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Li XZhou HMa LXin JHuang S(2024)Cost and Latency Customized SFC Deployment in Hybrid VNF and PNF EnvironmentIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2024.341517421:4(4312-4331)Online publication date: Aug-2024
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Nguyen TLe TNguyen MNguyen HVu S(2024)Optimizing Resource Allocation and VNF Embedding in RAN SlicingIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management10.1109/TNSM.2023.331930921:2(2187-2199)Online publication date: Apr-2024
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