Stateless Network Functions

Kablan, Murad; Caldwell, Blake; Han, Richard; Jamjoom, Hani; Keller, Eric

doi:10.1145/2785989.2785993

Cited by 57 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Another emerging approach to enable scalable applications relies on moving application states into backend systems . To provide fast access to on‐demand state and guarantee adequate application performance, extremely low‐latency interaction between the processing service and relevant data store is required.…”

Section: Challenges and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another emerging approach to enable scalable applications relies on moving application states into backend systems. 27 To provide fast access to on-demand state and guarantee adequate application performance, extremely low-latency interaction between the processing service and relevant data store is required. In case of distributed cloud environment, the backend data system needs to manage the state replication over multiple sites by providing a distribution protocol which guarantees state coherency among replicas.…”

Section: Support For Stateful Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Providing ultra‐short latency to user‐centric 5G applications at the mobile network edge

Farris

Taleb

Flinck

2017

Trans Emerging Tel Tech

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Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) will play a key role in next-generation mobile networks to extend the range of supported delay-sensitive applications. Furthermore, an increasing attention is paid to provide user-centric services, to better address the strict requirements of novel immersive applications. In this scenario, MEC solutions need to efficiently cope with user mobility, which requires fast relocation of service instances to guarantee the desired Quality of Experience. However, service migration is still an open issue, especially for resource-constrained edge nodes interconnected by high-latency and low-bandwidth links. In this paper, by leveraging the potential of lightweight container-based virtualization techniques, we investigate a novel approach to support service provisioning in dynamic MEC environments. In particular, we present a framework where proactive service replication for stateless applications is exploited to drastically reduce the time of service migration between different cloudlets and to meet the latency requirements. The performance evaluation shows promising results of our approach with respect to classic reactive service migration. INTRODUCTIONSeveral classes of new applications are challenging the current network and cloud infrastructures. As illustrated in a recent report from International Telecommunication Union, 1 applications such as tactile internet, mobile gaming, and augmented reality are pushing new requirements, especially in terms of latency. To guarantee the desired Quality of Experience (QoE) for the end user, not only the network access delay, but also the cloud service processing should be performed within a few milliseconds. To achieve the 1 ms latency dream for the next-generation 5G cloud-enabled services, both network and cloud providers should jointly cooperate and investigate novel approaches. In this regard, academic and industrial research communities have focused on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) solutions to exploit processing and storage capabilities at the edge of the network, as near as possible to the end user. 2,3 Indeed, the deployment of micro datacentres in the network access points, known as cloudlets, 4,5 can guarantee remarkable benefits of low latency interaction and scalability, by balancing the workload over the distributed edge infrastructure. Furthermore, bringing the cloudlet concept into the Internet of Things (IoT) scenario results in the definition of the so-called Fog Computing paradigm, which envisages a highly virtualized infrastructure composed of distributed edge nodes to monitor and analyse the most time-sensitive data generated by network connected devices. [6][7][8] In a MEC environment, a key challenge is represented by the user mobility, which could cause significant application degradation, even in small scenarios, as reported in a previous study.9,10 To guarantee service continuity and to meet the strict requirements of application latency, the MEC framework needs to properly cope with service migration between edge nodes. I...

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Section: Challenges and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Support For Stateful Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Providing ultra‐short latency to user‐centric 5G applications at the mobile network edge

Farris

Taleb

Flinck

2017

Trans Emerging Tel Tech

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“…Kablan et al [132] proposed stateless NFs. They argued that an NF should be stateless similar to agile stateless cloud-scale applications that store their states into a dedicated cache and back-end stores.…”

Section: State Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They leveraged a typical middlebox code structure that consists of three basic parts, i.e., initialization, packet receive loop, and packet processing, to design algorithms that use static program-analysis techniques in a way that significantly improves precision without compromising soundness. Several frameworks have been proposed for NFV management [61], [126], [128], [132], [137]- [139]. Middlebox application requires modifications to be controlled under these frameworks.…”

Section: State Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research Challenges for Network Function Virtualization - Re-Architecting Middlebox for High Performance and Efficient, Elastic and Resilient Platform to Create New Services -

Shiomoto

2018

IEICE Trans. Commun.

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SUMMARYToday's enterprise, data-center, and internet-serviceprovider networks deploy different types of network devices, including switches, routers, and middleboxes such as network address translation and firewalls. These devices are vertically integrated monolithic systems. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV) are promising technologies for dis-aggregating vertically integrated systems into components by using "softwarization". Software-defined networking separates the control plane from the data plane of switch and router, while NFV decouples high-layer service functions (SFs) or Network Functions (NFs) implemented in the data plane of a middlebox and enables the innovation of policy implementation by using SF chaining. Even though there have been several survey studies in this area, this area is continuing to grow rapidly. In this paper, we present a recent survey of this area. In particular, we survey research activities in the areas of re-architecting middleboxes, state management, high-performance platforms, service chaining, resource management, and trouble shooting. Efforts in these research areas will enable the development of future virtual-network-function platforms and innovation in service management while maintaining acceptable capital and operational expenditure. key words: network function virtualization, software-defined networking, service chain, policy management, resource management

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“…Handling this effect is often taken for granted, a piece of arbitrary logic that network programmers have to remember to apply and validate at different steps in a function pipeline or at egress. For example, in the still widely used [9,18,24] packet processing system Click [21], a CheckIP6Header module provides validation on the payload length field via: 1 if(ntohs(ip->ip6_plen) > (plen -40 )) 2 goto bad ;…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Checking-in on network functions

Lakhani

Miller

2019

Proceedings of the Applied Networking Research Workshop

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When programming network functions, changes within a packet tend to have consequences-side effects which must be accounted for by network programmers or administrators via arbitrary logic and an innate understanding of dependencies. Examples of this include updating checksums when a packet's contents has been modified or adjusting a payload length field of a IPv6 header if another header is added or updated within a packet. While static-typing captures interface specifications and how packet contents should behave, it does not enforce precise invariants around runtime dependencies like the examples above. Instead, during the design phase of network functions, programmers should be given an easier way to specify checks up front, all without having to account for and keep track of these consequences at each and every step during the development cycle. In keeping with this view, we present a unique approach for adding and generating both static checks and dynamic contracts for specifying and checking packet processing operations. We develop our technique within an existing framework called NetBricks and demonstrate how our approach simplifies and checks common dependent packet and header processing logic that other systems take for granted, all without adding much overhead during development.

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Stateless Network Functions

Cited by 57 publications

References 11 publications

Providing ultra‐short latency to user‐centric 5G applications at the mobile network edge

Providing ultra‐short latency to user‐centric 5G applications at the mobile network edge

Research Challenges for Network Function Virtualization - Re-Architecting Middlebox for High Performance and Efficient, Elastic and Resilient Platform to Create New Services -

Checking-in on network functions

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