Combined Stateful Classification and Session Splicing for High-Speed NFV Service Chaining

Network functions such as firewalls, NAT, DPI, content-aware optimizers, and load-balancers are increasingly realized as software to reduce costs and enable outsourcing. To meet performance requirements these virtual network functions (VNFs) often bypass the kernel and use their own user-space networking stack. A naïve realization of a chain of VNFs will exchange raw packets, leading to many redundant operations, wasting resources. In this work, we design a system to execute a pipeline of VNFs. We provide the user facilities to define (i) a traffic class of interest for the VNF, (ii) a session to group the packets (such as the TCP 4-tuple), and (iii) the amount of space per session. The system synthesizes a classifier and builds an efficient flow table that when possible will automatically be partially offloaded and accelerated by the network interface. We utilize an abstract view of flows to support seamless inspection and modification of the content of any flow (such as TCP or HTTP). By applying only surgical modifications to the protocol headers, we avoid the need for a complex, hard-to-maintain user-space TCP stack and can chain multiple VNFs without re-constructing the stream multiple times, allowing up to 5x improvement over standard approaches.