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Home » SoftFlow: A Middlebox Architecture for Open vSwitch
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SoftFlow: A Middlebox Architecture for Open vSwitch

Authors: 

Ethan J. Jackson, University of California, Berkeley; Melvin Walls, Penn State Harrisburg and University of California, Berkeley; Aurojit Panda, University of California, Berkeley; Justin Pettit, Ben Pfaff, and Jarno Rajahalme, VMware, Inc.; Teemu Koponen, Styra, Inc.; Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley, and International Computer Science Institute

Abstract: 

Open vSwitch is a high-performance multi-layer virtual switch that serves as a flexible foundation for building virtualized, stateless Layer 2 and 3 network services in multitenant datacenters. As workloads become more sophisticated, providing tenants with virtualized middlebox services is an increasingly important and recurring theme, yet it remains difficult to integrate these stateful services efficiently into Open vSwitch and its OpenFlow forwarding model: middleboxes perform complex operations that depend on internal state and inspection of packet payloads – functionality which is impossible to express in OpenFlow. In this paper, we present SoftFlow, an extension of Open vSwitch that seamlessly integratesmiddlebox functionality whilemaintaining the familiar OpenFlow forwarding model and performing significantly better than alternative techniques for middlebox integration.

Ethan J. Jackson, University of California, Berkeley

Melvin Walls, Penn State Harrisburg and University of California, Berkeley

Aurojit Panda, University of California, Berkeley

Justin Pettit, VMware, Inc.

Ben Pfaff, VMware, Inc.

Jarno Rajahalme, VMware, Inc.

Teemu Koponen, Styra, Inc.

Scott Shenker, University of California, Berkeley, and International Computer Science Institute

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {196180,
author = {Ethan J. Jackson and Melvin Walls and Aurojit Panda and Justin Pettit and Ben Pfaff and Jarno Rajahalme and Teemu Koponen and Scott Shenker},
title = {{SoftFlow}: A Middlebox Architecture for Open {vSwitch}},
booktitle = {2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 16)},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-931971-30-0},
address = {Denver, CO},
pages = {15--28},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical-sessions/presentation/jackson},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jun,
}
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