[keynote 2] Paving the way towards nfv: An infrastructure based approach

Abstract

Summary form only give, as follows. Provides an abstract of the keynote presentation and a brief professional biography of the presenter. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an initiative driven by the largest service providers (SP) to increase the use of virtualization and integrate intelligence into their network infrastructures. NFV leverages virtualization technology and operates network functions on standard servers to fundamentally decouple the customized and inflexible network hardware. Today, NFV provides a plethora of virtual network functions (VNFs), including gateways, mobile core, deep packet inspection (DPI), security, routing, and traffic management that can be combined to deliver the dynamic customized network service chains. Our exploration on both VM-based and container-based VNFs indicates that the service chaining can pose various challenges to NFV implementation on current commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) server. First, we observe that the NFV packet processing on COTS server exhibits a unique processing pattern - heterogeneous software pipeline, where the NFV traffic flows are processed by a variety of software components sequentially. On modern NUMA-based architecture, the end-to-end performance of NFV traffic flows can be severely affected by placing these heterogeneous software components inappropriately. We develop a thread scheduling mechanism that collaboratively places threads of heterogeneous software pipeline to minimize the end-to-end performance slowdown for NFV traffic flows. In the second part, we characterize the light-weight container-based VNF, which is expected to achieve shorter VNF provisioning time and lower resource overheads. However, we observe that the traffic flow processing in the shared host OS network stack involves a large amount of intermediate memory buffers and results in significant last level cache pollution. We propose NetContainer, a framework that achieves a fine-grained hardware resource management for containerized NFV platform. NetContainer exploits a cache access overhead guided page coloring technique to coordinately manage the inter/intra-flow cache access overheads.