E2: a framework for NFV applications

Shoumik Palkar, Chang Lan, Sangjin Han, Keon Jang, Aurojit Panda, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Luigi Rizzo, Scott Shenker

Abstract: By moving network appliance functionality from proprietary hardware to software, Network Function Virtualization promises to bring the advantages of cloud computing to network packet processing. However, the evolution of cloud computing (particularly for data analytics) has greatly benefited from application-independent methods for scaling and placement that achieve high efficiency while relieving programmers of these burdens. NFV has no such general management solutions. In this paper, we present a scalable and application-agnostic scheduling framework for packet processing, and compare its performance to current approaches.