SpeedyBox: Low-Latency NFV Service Chains with Cross-NF Runtime Consolidation

Software-based service chains in Network Function Virtualization (NFV) typically suffers high processing latency. This latency grows as chain lengths increase and possibly violates application requirements. Previous efforts focus on reducing latency while maintaining the perspective of each NF being an independent, isolated module. This results in processing redundancy that could eventually become the performance bottleneck. In this paper, we propose a low-latency NFV framework called SpeedyBox, that innovatively enables cross-NF runtime optimizations in a service chain to eliminate processing redundancy. SpeedyBox builds a fast data path for flows at runtime by consolidating the aggregate actions across diverse network functions (NFs) in a service chain. In SpeedyBox, each NF is instrumented with a stateful Local Match-Action Table (MAT), and leverages our easy-to-use APIs to record its per-flow behavior in the Local MAT. Next, SpeedyBox uses a Global MAT to build the fast data path by consolidating actions from each Local MAT, while providing the ability to express the stateful NF behaviors with an Event Table. We have implemented a prototype of SpeedyBox on the BESS and OpenNetVM NFV platforms. Our trace-driven evaluation on common NFs shows that SpeedyBox achieves significant latency reduction under real world scenarios.