ICE-T:RC: Accelerating NFV Service Function Chain Processing at Scale

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Network Function Virtualization (NFV), coupled with Software Defined Networking (SDN), promises to revolutionize networking. Operators can create, update or scale out/in (virtualized) network functions (vNFs) on demand, construct a sequence of vNFs to form a service function chain (SFC) and steer traffic through it to meet various policy and service requirements. In emerging 5th Generation (5G) cellular networking technologies, NFV will be a key enabling technology for support of dynamic network slicing and diverse services ranging from enhanced mobile broadband to massive machine type communications and ultra-reliable low latency communications.This project advances a novel distributed parallelization framework, dubbed HydraNF, for accelerating NFV service function chain processing at scale. HydraNF will be designed to simultaneously tackle the performance and auto-scaling challenges in large scale deployment of NFV by taking full advantage of a cluster of multi-core servers for dynamic and elastic scale-out. The proposed project considers the problem of scaling and accelerating NFV service chains leveraging parallelism across multi-cores on a server as well as across multiple servers in a cluster. The project is framed within the context of 5G cellular service and the intended cloud radio access network, mobile edge clouds, and packet cores that are envisioned for future 5G networks. The project team will design a framework, called HydraNF, and study 1) models for VNF behaviors and SFC specification, 2) a controller for SFC decomposition, graph construction and mapping, placement and rule generation, 3) a data plane engine, and 4) the implementation, evaluation and integration within the European collaborator's 5G testbed. This is a collaborative research project with the University of Minnesota and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, Spain.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.