STEAN: A storage and transformation engine for advanced networking context

Legacy Internet systems and protocols are mostly static and keep state information in silo-style storage, thus making state migration, transformation and re-use difficult. Software Defined Networking (SDN) approaches in unison with Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) allow for more flexibility, yet they are currently restricted to a limited set of state migration options. Impeding the sharing of networking and system state severely limits the ability to optimally manage resources and dynamically adapt to a desirable overall configuration. We propose a generalized way to collect, store, transform, and share context between NFs in both the legacy Internet and NFV/SDN-driven systems. To this end, we design and implement a Storage and Transformation Engine for Advanced Networking Context (STEAN), which constitutes a shared context storage, making network state information available to other systems and protocols. Its pivotal feature is the ability to allow for state transformation as well as for persisting state to enable future reuse. By means of experimentation, we show that STEAN covers a diverse set of challenging use cases in legacy systems as well as in NFV/SDN-enabled systems.