ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining

Yang Zhang; Bilal Anwer; Vijay Gopalakrishnan; Bo Han; Joshua Reich; Aman Shaikh; Zhi-Li Zhang

doi:10.1145/3050220.3050236

ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining

Yang Zhang, Bilal Anwer, Vijay Gopalakrishnan, Bo Han, Joshua Reich, Aman Shaikh, Zhi-Li Zhang

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

75 Scopus citations

Abstract

Service Function Chains (SFCs) comprise a sequence of Network Functions (NFs) that are typically traversed in-order by data flows. Consequently, SFC delay grows linearly with the length of the SFC. Yet, for highly latency sensitive applications, this delay may be unacceptable - particularly when the constituent NFs are virtualized, running on commodity servers. In this paper, we investigate how SFC latency may be reduced by exploiting opportunities for parallel packet processing across NFs. We propose ParaBox, a novel hybrid packet processing architecture that, when possible, dynamically distributes packets to VNFs in parallel and merges their outputs intelligently to ensure the preservation of correct sequential processing semantics. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we implement a ParaBox prototype on top of the DPDK-enabled Berkeley Extensible Software Switch. Our preliminary experiment results show that ParaBox can not only significantly reduce the service chaining latency, but also improve throughput.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages	143-149
Number of pages	7
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450349475
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3050220.3050236
State	Published - Apr 3 2017
Event	2017 Symposium on SDN Research, SOSR 2017 - Santa Clara, United States Duration: Apr 3 2017 → Apr 4 2017

Publication series

Name	SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research

Other

Other	2017 Symposium on SDN Research, SOSR 2017
Country/Territory	United States
City	Santa Clara
Period	4/3/17 → 4/4/17

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by NSF grants CNS-1411636, CNS 1618339 and CNS 1617729, DTRA grant HDTRA1-14-1-0040 and DoD ARO MURI Award W911NF-12-1-0385.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.

Keywords

Network function virtualization
Service function chaining

Access

10.1145/3050220.3050236

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Cite this

Zhang, Y., Anwer, B., Gopalakrishnan, V., Han, B., Reich, J., Shaikh, A., & Zhang, Z.-L. (2017). ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining. In SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research (pp. 143-149). (SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/3050220.3050236

ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining. / Zhang, Yang; Anwer, Bilal; Gopalakrishnan, Vijay et al.
SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2017. p. 143-149 (SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Zhang, Y, Anwer, B, Gopalakrishnan, V, Han, B, Reich, J, Shaikh, A & Zhang, Z-L 2017, ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining. in SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research. SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, pp. 143-149, 2017 Symposium on SDN Research, SOSR 2017, Santa Clara, United States, 4/3/17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3050220.3050236

Zhang Y, Anwer B, Gopalakrishnan V, Han B, Reich J, Shaikh A et al. ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining. In SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research. Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. 2017. p. 143-149. (SOSR 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Symposium on SDN Research). doi: 10.1145/3050220.3050236

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ParaBox: Exploiting parallelism for virtual network functions in service chaining

Abstract

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Bibliographical note

Keywords

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