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NFP: Enabling Network Function Parallelism in NFV

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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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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Author Tags

  1. NFV
  2. network function parallelism
  3. service chain

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SIGCOMM '17: ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Conference
August 21 - 25, 2017
CA, Los Angeles, USA

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  • (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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