EdgePlex: decomposing the provider edge for flexibilty and reliability

The service provider edge is responsible for connecting customers using standard protocols such as IP and BGP to the service providers internal network while enforcing service specific policies and service guarantees. Today this function is performed by the Provider Edge Router (PE). The specialized nature of the PE, however, restricts operational flexibility and their monolithic design impacts reliability. In this paper, we propose a new edge router architecture following SDN and NFV principals called EdgePlex. EdgePlex is a distributed system where the functions performed by a traditional edge router are decomposed and assigned to different elements in the system. A key aspect of our design is the use of a sandboxed environment (through the use of virtual machines) per customer. This gives EdgePlex the ability to isolate customers from one-another and independently move customers within and across EdgePlex platforms. We describe the architecture and a prototype implementation of EdgePlex. We perform detailed experiments using this prototype and show that EdgePlex is able to saturate the server in terms of throughput while having acceptable latency and jitter overheads. Our results lead us to believe that the EdgePlex design not only addresses the limitations of existing routers, but is also viable and can meet performance demands of production networks.