Microservice-based NFV Framework

Network operators ubiquitously deploy hardware middleboxes such as firewalls, proxies, WAN optimizer, intrusion detection and prevention systems to realize different network services. These middleboxes are vertically-integrated, expensive, and proprietary hardware appliances with limited or no programmability and require specially trained personnel for deployment and maintenance, resulting in increased capital and operational expenditure for the network operators. Recently, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has proposed to move the network functions offered by these hardware middleboxes to software (also known as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs)) running on commodity servers to reduce cost and increase flexibility. However, a fundamental problem with existing VNFs is the existence of a large number of common functionalities (e.g., packet classification, payload inspection, etc.) repeated across different VNFs. This has several negative consequences, including redundant development of functionalities in different VNFs and coarse grained resource allocation and scaling imposed by the monolithic nature of VNFs among others.TO BE CONT’D

Faculty Supervisor:

Raouf Boutaba

Student:

Partner:

Inria Nancy - Grand-Est Research Centre

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

University:

University of Waterloo

Program:

Globalink Research Award