MicroNF: An Efficient Framework for Enabling Modularized Service Chains in NFV

The modularization of service function chains (SFCs) in network function virtualization (NFV) could introduce significant performance overhead and resource efficiency degradation due to introducing frequent packet transfer and consuming much more hardware resources. In response, we exploit the reusability, lightweightness, and individual scalability features of elements in modularized SFCs (MSFCs) and propose MicroNF, an efficient framework for MSFC in NFV. MicroNF addresses the performance overhead and resource efficiency problems in three ways. First, MicroNF graph constructor reuses the processing results of elements from different NFs and reconstructs the MSFC after modularization to shorten the chain latency. Second, optimized placer pays attention to the problem of which elements to consolidate and provides a performance-aware placement algorithm to place MSFCs compactly and optimize the global packet transfer cost. Third, MicroNF individual scaler innovatively introduces a push-aside scaling up strategy to avoid degrading performance and taking up new CPU cores. To support MSFC reusing and consolidation, MicroNF also designs a high-performance infrastructure to efficiently forwarding packets with consistency ensured and to automatically scheduling elements with fairness ensured when the elements are consolidated on the CPU core. Our evaluation results show that MicroNF achieves significant performance improvement and efficient resource utilization on several metrics.