Outsourcing network functionality

TL;DR: The challenges facing the large scale deployment of OpenFlow-based networks are described, the future research directions of this technology are discussed and it is discussed that software-based traffic analysis, centralized control, dynamic updating of forwarding rules and flow abstraction are to be considered.

Abstract: Middleboxes or network appliances like firewalls, proxies, and WAN optimizers have become an integral part of today’s ISP and enterprise networks Middlebox functionalities are usually deployed on expensive and proprietary hardware that require trained personnel for deployment and maintenance Middleboxes contribute significantly to a network’s capital and operation costs In addition, organizations often require their traffic to pass through a specific sequence of middleboxes for compliance with security and performance policies This makes the middlebox deployment and maintenance tasks even more complicated Network function virtualization (NFV) is an emerging and promising technology that is envisioned to overcome these challenges It proposes to move packet processing from dedicated hardware middleboxes to software running on commodity servers In NFV terminology, software middleboxes are referred to as virtualized network functions (VNFs) It is a challenging problem to determine the required number and placement of VNFs that optimizes network operational costs and utilization, without violating service level agreements We call this the VNF orchestration problem (VNF-OP) and provide an integer linear programming formulation with implementation in CPLEX We also provide a dynamic programming-based heuristic to solve larger instances of VNF-OP Trace driven simulations on real-world network topologies demonstrate that the heuristic can provide solutions that are within 13 times of the optimal solution Our experiments suggest that a VNF-based approach can provide more than $ {4\times }$ reduction in the operational cost of a network

TL;DR: This paper proposes that software defined networking technology be used to dynamically block/quarantine devices, based on their network activity and on the context within the house such as time-of-day or occupancy-level, which can augment device-centric security for the emerging smart-home.

TL;DR: This paper presents SIMPLE, a SDN-based policy enforcement layer that simplifies middlebox traffic steering by addressing algorithmic and system design challenges, enabling efficient integration with legacy middleboxes and existing SDN interfaces.

TL;DR: Ethane allows managers to define a single network-wide fine-grain policy, and then enforces it directly, and this design is backwards-compatible with existing hosts and switches.

TL;DR: This work advocate a complete refactoring of the functionality and proposes three key principles--network-level objectives, network-wide views, and direct control--that it believes should underlie a new architecture, called 4D, after the architecture's four planes: decision, dissemination, discovery, and data.

TL;DR: An overlay-based Internet Indirection Infrastructure that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction that decouples the act of sending from the acts of receiving, and allows I3 to efficiently support a wide variety of fundamental communication services.

TL;DR: It is shown that RCP assigns routes correctly, even when the functionality is replicated and distributed, and that networks using RCP can expect comparable convergence delays to those using today's iBGP architectures.