Enabling End-Host Network Functions

Ballani, Hitesh; Costa, Paolo; Gkantsidis, Christos; Grosvenor, Matthew P.; Karagiannis, Thomas; Koromilas, Lazaros; O'Shea, Greg

doi:10.1145/2785956.2787493

Cited by 40 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…This means that, in a DDoS mitigation scenario, packets belonging to legitimate sources have to be inserted back into the kernel, causing unnecessary packet copies that slow down the performance. 1 Furthermore, these frameworks require the fixed allocation of one (or more) CPU cores to the above programs, independently from the presence of an ongoing attack, hence reducing the performance-cost ratio, as precious CPU resources are no longer available for normal processing tasks (e.g., virtual machines).…”

Section: ) Host-based Mitigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With the recent trend of ''network softwarization'', promoted by emerging technologies such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN), system administrators of data center and enterprise networks have started to replace dedicated hardware-based middleboxes with virtualized Network Functions (NFs) running on commodity servers and end hosts [1]- [6]. This radical change has facilitated the provisioning of advanced and flexible network services, ultimately helping the system administrators to cope with the rapid changes on service requirements and networking workloads.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Introducing SmartNICs in Server-Based Data Plane Processing: The DDoS Mitigation Use Case

et al. 2019

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In the recent years, the complexity of the network data plane and their requirements in terms of agility has increased significantly, with many network functions now implemented in software and executed directly in datacenter servers. To avoid bottlenecks and to keep up with the ever increasing network speeds, recent approaches propose to move the software packet processing in kernel space using technologies such as eBPF/XDP, or to offload (part of it) in specialized hardware, the so called SmartNICs. This paper aims at guiding the reader through the intricacies of the above mentioned technologies, leveraging SmartNICs to build a more efficient processing pipeline and providing concrete insights on their usage for a specific use case, namely, the mitigation of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In particular, we enhance the mitigation capabilities of edge servers by transparently offloading a portion of DDoS mitigation rules in the SmartNIC, thus achieving a balanced combination of the XDP flexibility in operating traffic sampling and aggregation in the kernel, with the performance of hardware-based filtering. We evaluate the performance in different combinations of host and SmartNIC-based mitigation, showing that offloading part of the DDoS network function in the SmartNIC can indeed optimize the packet processing but only if combined with additional processing on the host kernel space.

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Section: ) Host-based Mitigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introducing SmartNICs in Server-Based Data Plane Processing: The DDoS Mitigation Use Case

et al. 2019

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“…Also, rather than modifying network switches, a recent hardware trend towards programmable NICs [2,25] could allow the proposer and acceptor logic to run at the network edge, on programmable NICs that provide high-speed processing at minimal latencies (tens of µs). Via the PICe bus, the programmable NIC could communicate to the host OS and obtain access to permanent storage.…”

Section: Paxos In Sdn Switchesmentioning

confidence: 99%

NetPaxos

Dang

Sciascia

Canini

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCOMM Symposium on Software Defined Networking Research

102

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This paper explores the possibility of implementing the widely deployed Paxos consensus protocol in network devices. We present two different approaches: (i) a detailed design description for implementing the full Paxos logic in SDN switches, which identifies a sufficient set of required OpenFlow extensions; and (ii) an alternative, optimistic protocol which can be implemented without changes to the OpenFlow API, but relies on assumptions about how the network orders messages. Although neither of these protocols can be fully implemented without changes to the underlying switch firmware, we argue that such changes are feasible in existing hardware. Moreover, we present an evaluation that suggests that moving Paxos logic into the network would yield significant performance benefits for distributed applications.

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“…Some of these proposals focus on providing per-flow fairness [18,20,34] with various network-level objectives, such as minimizing per-packet latency [25] or flow completion time [5,6,44] using network-level properties, such as flow size or deadlines [5,6,13,25,44,55]. Other works aim to provide isolation among tenants or applications when running in shared datacenters [11,12,23,27,32,48,57].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Saba: Rethinking Datacenter Network Allocation from Application's Perspective

Katebzadeh

Costa

Grot

2023

Proceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

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Today's datacenter workloads increasingly comprise distributed data-intensive applications, including data analytics, graph processing, and machine-learning training. These applications are bandwidth-hungry and often congest the datacenter network, resulting in poor network performance, which hurts application completion time. Efforts made to address this problem generally aim to achieve max-min fairness at the flow or application level. We observe that splitting the bandwidth equally among workloads is sub-optimal for aggregate application-level performance because various workloads exhibit different sensitivity to network bandwidth: for some workloads, even a small reduction in the available bandwidth yields a significant increase in completion time; for others, the completion time is largely insensitive to the available bandwidth.Building on this insight, we propose Saba, an applicationaware bandwidth allocation framework that distributes network bandwidth based on application-level sensitivity. Saba combines ahead-of-time application profiling to determine bandwidth sensitivity with runtime bandwidth allocation using lightweight software support with no modifications to network hardware or protocols. Experiments with a 32server hardware testbed show that Saba improves average completion time by 1.88× (and by 1.27× in a simulated 1,944server cluster).

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Enabling End-Host Network Functions

Cited by 40 publications

References 44 publications

Introducing SmartNICs in Server-Based Data Plane Processing: The DDoS Mitigation Use Case

Introducing SmartNICs in Server-Based Data Plane Processing: The DDoS Mitigation Use Case

NetPaxos

Saba: Rethinking Datacenter Network Allocation from Application's Perspective

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