Metron: High-performance NFV Service Chaining Even in the Presence of Blackboxes

Deployment of 100Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) links challenges the packet processing limits of commodity hardware used for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). Moreover, realizing chained network functions (i.e., service chains) necessitates the use of multiple CPU cores, or even multiple servers, to process packets from such high speed links. Our system Metron jointly exploits the underlying network and commodity servers’ resources: ( i ) to offload part of the packet processing logic to the network, ( ii ) by using smart tagging to setup and exploit the affinity of traffic classes, and ( iii ) by using tag-based hardware dispatching to carry out the remaining packet processing at the speed of the servers’ cores, with zero inter-core communication. Moreover, Metron transparently integrates, manages, and load balances proprietary “blackboxes” together with Metron service chains. Metron realizes stateful network functions at the speed of 100GbE network cards on a single server, while elastically and rapidly adapting to changing workload volumes. Our experiments demonstrate that Metron service chains can coexist with heterogeneous blackboxes, while still leveraging Metron’s accurate dispatching and load balancing. In summary, Metron has ( i ) 2.75–8× better efficiency, up to ( ii ) 4.7× lower latency, and ( iii ) 7.8× higher throughput than OpenBox, a state-of-the-art NFV system.