Hao Li and Yihan Dang, Xi'an Jiaotong University; Guangda Sun, Xi'an Jiaotong University and National University of Singapore; Guyue Liu, New York University Shanghai; Danfeng Shan and Peng Zhang, Xi'an Jiaotong University
NFV has entered into a new era that heterogeneous frameworks coexist. NFs built upon those frameworks are thus not interoperable, obstructing operators from getting the best of the breed. Traditional interoperation solutions either incur large overhead, e.g., virtualizing NFs into containers, or require huge code modification, e.g., rewriting NFs with specific abstractions. We present LemonNFV, a novel NFV framework that can consolidate heterogeneous NFs without code modification. LemonNFV loads NFs into a single process down to the binary level, schedules them using an intercepted I/O, and isolates them with the help of a restricted memory allocator. Experiments show that LemonNFV can consolidate 5 complex NFs without modifying the native code while achieving comparable performance to the ideal and state-of-the-art pure consolidation approaches with only 0.7–4.3% overhead.
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author = {Hao Li and Yihan Dang and Guangda Sun and Guyue Liu and Danfeng Shan and Peng Zhang},
title = {{LemonNFV}: Consolidating Heterogeneous Network Functions at Line Speed},
booktitle = {20th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 23)},
year = {2023},
isbn = {978-1-939133-33-5},
address = {Boston, MA},
pages = {1451--1468},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi23/presentation/li-hao},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr
}