Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network Functions

doi:10.1109/TNET.2023.3307641

Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network Functions

2024-04-01

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DOI：10.1109/TNET.2023.3307641

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Middleboxes are becoming indispensable in modern networks. However, programming the network stack of middleboxes to support emerging transport protocols and flexible stack hierarchy is still a daunting task. To this end, we propose Rubik, a language that greatly facilitates the task of middlebox stack programming. Different from existing hand-written approaches, Rubik offers various high-level constructs for relieving the operators from dealing with massive native code, so that they can focus on specifying their processing intents. We show that using Rubik one can program the middlebox stack with minor effort, e.g., 250 lines of code for a complete TCP/IP stack, which is a reduction of 2 orders of magnitude compared to the hand-written versions. To maintain a high performance, we conduct extensive optimizations at the middle-and back-end of the compiler. Experiments show that the stacks generated by Rubik outperform the mature hand-written stacks by at least 30% in throughput.

Keywords:

Middleboxes

network function virtualization (NFV)

software defined networking

Programming Network Stack for Physical Middleboxes and Virtualized Network Functions

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