Network Function Offloading on Programmable Switch with Sequential Pipelines

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) allows network functions (NFs) to be chained as a service function chain (SFC) and deployed on a number of servers through virtualization technology, enabling flexible processing of network functions. With the development of programmable switches in recent years, some switches, such as P4 switches, are also capable of processing NFs, which can effectively improve the throughput of the system and reduce the processing latency of SFCs. But current programmable switches can only allow packets to be processed in a fixed NF order. Such a feature creates new problems in situations where network SFC requests are in a dynamic randomized manner. Based on the above background, this paper proposes a policy algorithm for accelerating SFC processing based on P4 switches. Our scheme take into account the sequential requirements of SFCs and the sequential structure of the P4 switch pipeline, and uses multiple switches to jointly process SFCs, which is able to handle dynamically generated SFCs with superior performance. Compared with other algorithms, our algorithm is able to achieve lower latency.