[PAST EVENT] Designing New Abstractions for High-Performance Network Functions

March 7, 2019
8am - 9am
Location
McGlothlin-Street Hall, Room 020
251 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location

Speaker: Guyue Liu (http://grace-liu.github.io/), George Washington University


Title: Designing New Abstractions for High-Performance Network Functions


Abstract:

Today's networks are responsible for more than routing packets and

perform a wide range of functionality such as firewalls, proxies, and

caches to improve performance and security. Specialized hardware

devices used to run these functions but are no longer a great choice

for cloud providers and large carriers due to high cost and low

flexibility. Software-based networking technologies such as Network

Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

promise to offer agility, flexibility and reduce the expenditures for

network operators. However, there are challenges across the system,

application, and service layers to fully achieve these benefits.


In this talk, I will present my research on designing new abstractions

for network functions to run in software-based environments. First, I

will present OpenNetVM, an open source NFV platform that allows

researchers and developers to quickly develop and deploy network

services inside of containers. I will show how OpenNetVM achieves high

performance and flexibility by decoupling service management from the

packet processing. Then, I will present Microboxes, a novel service

chaining abstraction designed to support transport and application

layer network functions. I will show how Microboxes eliminates

redundant processing and enables a modular design by breaking the

"packet-centric" model used by existing NFV frameworks.


Bio

Guyue Liu (http://grace-liu.github.io/) is a Ph.D. candidate in the

Department of Computer Science at George Washington University,

advised by Professor Timothy Wood. Her research interests are in the

areas of networking systems, cloud computing, and edge computing. She

has published research papers in prestigious conferences, including

SIGCOMM and CoNEXT. She has interned and collaborated with leading

research institutes, such as Microsoft Research and Hewlett Packard

Labs. She received a bachelor's degree from Beijing University of

Posts and Telecommunications in 2012. She has won the HP Helion

OpenStack Scholarship, the First Place in GENI Competition, and an

RTAS Best Student Paper Award.

Contact

Xu Liu