FlowOS: a Flow-Based Platform for Middleboxes

Middleboxes are heavily used in the Internet to process the
network tra c for a speci c purpose. As there is no open
standards, these proprietary boxes are expensive and di -
cult to upgrade. In this paper, we present a programmable
platform for middleboxes called FlowOS to run on commod-
ity hardware. It provides an elegant programming model for
writing ow processing software, which hides the complexi-
ties of low-level packet processing, process synchronisation,
and inter-process communication. We show that FlowOS
itself does not add any signi cant overhead to ows by pre-
senting some preliminary test results.