A Standardized Southbound API for VNF Management

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offers network operators great flexibility toward managing network functions, i.e. in-network appliances such as firewalls, load balancers and NATs. Several frameworks exist to this end; however VNF management is fragmented, and no standard management API exists. As a result, each framework uses a proprietary API which a network function must support to fully realize its benefits. This lack of standardization is a major barrier in the wider adoption of NFV. We propose a standard, framework-agnostic southbound API to facilitate faster adoption of NFV and enable innovation in the design of both management frameworks and network functions.

[1]  Scott Shenker,et al.  Rollback-Recovery for Middleboxes , 2015, Comput. Commun. Rev..

[2]  Minlan Yu,et al.  FlowTags: enforcing network-wide policies in the presence of dynamic middlebox actions , 2013, HotSDN '13.

[3]  Katerina J. Argyraki,et al.  Toward Predictable Performance in Software Packet-Processing Platforms , 2012, NSDI.

[4]  Anja Feldmann,et al.  Predicting the resource consumption of network intrusion detection systems , 2008, SIGMETRICS '08.

[5]  Keqiang He,et al.  PerfSight: Performance Diagnosis for Software Dataplanes , 2015, Internet Measurement Conference.

[6]  Wim Henderickx,et al.  Network Service Header , 2015 .

[7]  Minlan Yu,et al.  Enforcing Network-Wide Policies in the Presence of Dynamic Middlebox Actions using FlowTags , 2014, NSDI.

[8]  Marcelo Bagnulo,et al.  Evolving the internet with connection acrobatics , 2013, HotMiddlebox '13.

[9]  Minlan Yu,et al.  SIMPLE-fying middlebox policy enforcement using SDN , 2013, SIGCOMM.

[10]  Aditya Akella,et al.  OpenNF , 2014, SIGCOMM.

[11]  Aditya Akella,et al.  Paving the Way for NFV: Simplifying Middlebox Modifications Using StateAlyzr , 2016, NSDI.

[12]  Anees Shaikh,et al.  Virtual network diagnosis as a service , 2013, SoCC.

[13]  Michalis Faloutsos,et al.  SyFi: A Systematic Approach for Estimating Stateful Firewall Performance , 2012, PAM.

[14]  Hani Jamjoom,et al.  Stateless Network Functions , 2015, HotMiddlebox@SIGCOMM.

[15]  Vyas Sekar,et al.  Stratos: A Network-Aware Orchestration Layer for Middleboxes in the Cloud , 2013, ArXiv.

[16]  Andrew Warfield,et al.  Split/Merge: System Support for Elastic Execution in Virtual Middleboxes , 2013, NSDI.

[17]  Anja Feldmann,et al.  Predicting the resource consumption of network intrusion detection systems , 2008, SIGMETRICS '08.

[18]  Aditya Akella,et al.  Improving the Safety, Scalability, and Efficiency of Network Function State Transfers , 2015, HotMiddlebox@SIGCOMM.

[19]  Hani Jamjoom,et al.  Pico replication: a high availability framework for middleboxes , 2013, SoCC.

[20]  Aditya Akella,et al.  OpenNF: enabling innovation in network function control , 2015, SIGCOMM 2015.