MBBrick: Unified middlebox design anc deployment in software defined network

Xin He, Qing Li, Mingwei Xu, Yong Jiang, Lei Wang

Abstract: Due to the expensive hardware and complex management of the traditional middlebox, a concerted effort towards the virtualized middlebox has been launched in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a unified middlebox model, MBBrick, which is composed of three operation modules (classifier, rewriter, forwarder) and a control module (the mcontroller). We then design a language, MG, to describe the MBBrick process. By concatenating different modules, MBBrick can achieve the functions of different middleboxes or service chains in one single super middlebox. We design the corresponding algorithms to optimize the MBBrick deployment and schedule the traffic. The experiment results show that MBBrick significantly reduces the processing latency and improves the network throughput.