StateOS: Enabling Versatile Network Function Virtualization in Edge Clouds

Network Functions (NFs) in edge clouds are required to provide scalability, fault tolerance, and mobility support. They all require maintaining NF states (i.e., processing results), e.g., for recovery, especially for stateful NFs like firewalls. Even though current solutions provide an alternative to storing states in memory, their design can support only a single requirement, either fault tolerance or scaling. Advocating the versatility, we propose StateOS - an operating system of NF states for user-defined programs supporting different requirements. Additionally, we propose a state transfer scheme, namely Divide-and-Conquer (DAC), to accelerate StateOS. The combination of DAC and StateOS demonstrates its efficiency for all three scenarios: scaling, fault tolerance, and service function chain acceleration.