NetStar: A Future/Promise Framework for Asynchronous Network Functions

Network functions (NFs) are more than simple packet processors that apply various transformations to the packet content. Modern NFs often resort to various external services to achieve their purposes, e.g., storing flow states in an external storage or looking up a DNS. Working with external services is usually implemented using callback-based asynchronous programming, which is complex and error-prone. This paper proposes NetStar, a new NF programming framework that brings the future/promise abstraction to the NF dataplane for flow processing. NetStar simplifies asynchronous NF programming via a carefully designed async-flow interface that exploits the future/promise paradigm by chaining multiple continuation functions for asynchronous operations handling. The programs implemented using the NetStar framework mimic simple synchronous programming but are able to achieve full flow processing asynchrony. We have used NetStar to implement a number of representative NFs. Our experience and evaluation results show that NetStar can effectively simplify asynchronous NF programming by substantially reducing the lines of code, while still approaching line-rate packet processing speeds.