FlexNF: Flexible Network Function Orchestration on the Programmable Data Plane

Hanyu Zhao, Qing Li, Jingpu Duan, Yong Jiang, Kai Liu

Abstract: Recently, Programmable Data Plane (PDP) has been leveraged to offload Network Functions (NFs). Due to its high processing capabilities, programmable data plane can improve the performance of NFs to more than one order of magnitude. However, the coarse-grained NF orchestration granularity on the PDP makes it hard to fulfill the dynamic service chain demands. In this paper, we propose the Flexible Network Function (FlexNF) Deployment on the programmable data plane. We first design an NF Selection Framework which leverages labels and the pipeline re-enter operation to support Selective Serving Mechanism for flexible NF orchestration. We then design a two-stage service path construction algorithm to provide on-path service based on SSM with load balancing taken into account. We implement 7 types of real network functions in the commodity P4 switch, based which we construct the comprehensive experiments. The results show that FlexNF can reduce the traffic routing delay by about 42.6% while increasing service chain acceptance rate by 5 times compared with current solutions.