CRI: CI-EN: Collaborative Research: OpenNetVM: A Software Platform Enabling Network Function Virtualization Research

网络功能虚拟化是一种“颠覆性”技术，它将网络从传输管道转变为提供灵活服务的软件定义基础设施。通过将网络功能转换为动态分配的软件容器，可以支持新类型的应用程序以及更好的网络管理。OpenNetVM是一个开源软件平台，旨在为希望探索该领域挑战的研究人员和希望评估新型网络服务的开发人员降低障碍。该项目将为这些领域的创新提供坚实而灵活的基础。主要研究人员将通过频繁的教程和演示来鼓励社区采用。通信网络日益成为“基于软件的”。网络功能虚拟化（Network Function Virtualization， NFV）提供了一个高性能的网络数据平面（例如，防火墙、代理之类的中间设备），目前受到了研究和业界的广泛关注。NFV的研究一直受到软件平台不足的阻碍，这些软件平台要么只提供对数据包数据的非常低级的访问（这使得很难评估复杂的服务），要么基于传统的数据包处理方法，这些方法在当前的适用性方面性能非常差。研究人员将维护OpenNetVM作为开源（BSD （Berkeley Software Distribution）许可）软件基础设施，提供高级抽象和底层框架，提供线速性能、调度原语和可扩展性，为工业和学术研究人员提供一种快速方便地构建网络功能的方法。OpenNetVM在轻量级容器中运行网络功能，很容易组合形成复杂的“服务链”。该项目旨在通过添加用户空间协议栈来支持更复杂的NFs和服务，从而大大扩展所支持的应用程序类型，从而为OpenNetVM提供对真实中间件的改进支持。该项目还扩展了OpenNetVM，以支持共享每个CPU核心的多个NFs，以及NFs分布在集群中的分布式部署，从而可以研究NFV资源管理、NF放置和复杂的服务链。最后，OpenNetVM将被扩展到底层性能指标，这将使自动化资源管理平台的研究成为可能。为了便于采用，研究人员将在主要会议上提供全面的文档、教程，以及使用诸如NSF CloudLab等可公开访问的资源的模板图像。其结果将是一个全面的、开源的平台，可以在网络和操作系统社区中广泛使用。此外，该项目支持培养多样化的学生，重点是培养本科生和研究生的混合，以进入基于软件的网络的高需求领域。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Network Function Virtualization is a "disruptive" technology that changes the network from a transport pipe to a software-defined infrastructure offering flexible services. By transforming network functions to dynamically allocated software containers, new types of applications can be supported along with better network management. OpenNetVM is an open source software platform that seeks to lower the barrier for researchers wishing to explore challenges in this area, and for developers wishing to evaluate new types of network services. This project will provide a robust and flexible foundation that will enable new innovations in these areas. The principal investigators will engage the community to encourage adoption through frequent tutorials and demonstrations. Communication Networks have increasingly become `software based'. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) provides a high-performance network data plane (e.g., middleboxes like firewalls, proxies) and is currently seeing both research and industry interest. NFV research has been stymied by the inadequate software platforms that either offer only very low-level access to packet data (making it difficult to evaluate complex services), or are based on traditional packet-processing approaches that have very poor performance for current-day applicability. The researchers will maintain OpenNetVM as an open-source (BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) license) software infrastructure, providing high-level abstractions with an underlying framework that provides wire-speed performance, primitives for scheduling, and scalability, that offers both industry and academic researchers a way to quickly and conveniently build network functions. OpenNetVM runs network functions in lightweight containers, easily combined to form complex "service chains". The project seeks to provide improved support for real middleboxes with OpenNetVM by adding user space protocol stacks enabling more complex NFs and services, substantially expanding the types of applications supported. The project also expands OpenNetVM to support many NFs that share each CPU core, and distributed deployments where NFs are spread across a cluster, thus enabling research into NFV resource management, NF placement, and complex service chaining. Finally, OpenNetVM will be extended to expose low-level performance metrics that will enable research into automated resource management platforms. To facilitate adoption the researchers will provide comprehensive documentation, tutorials at major conferences, and template images using publicly accessible resources such as NSF CloudLab. The result will be a comprehensive, open source platform that can be used broadly across the networking and operating systems communities. In addition, this project supports the training of a diverse body of students, with an emphasis on preparing a mix of undergraduate and graduate students for entering the high demand field of software-based networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.