Biblio

As an extension of Network Function Virtualization, microservice architectures are a promising way to design future network services. At the same time, Information-Centric Networking architectures like NDN would benefit from this paradigm to offer more design choices for the network architect while facilitating the deployment and the operation of the network. We propose $μ$NDN, an orchestrated suite of microservices as an alternative way to implement NDN forwarding and support functions. We describe seven essential micro-services we developed, explain the design choices behind our solution and how it is orchestrated. We evaluate each service in isolation and the entire microservice architecture through two realistic scenarios to show its ability to react and mitigate some performance and security issues thanks to the orchestration. Our results show that $μ$NDN can replace a monolithic NDN forwarder while being more powerful and scalable.

As an extension of Network Function Virtualization, microservice architectures are a promising way to design future network services. At the same time, Information-Centric Networking architectures like NDN would benefit from this paradigm to offer more design choices for the network architect while facilitating the deployment and the operation of the network. We propose μNDN, an orchestrated suite of microservices as an alternative way to implement NDN forwarding and support functions. We describe seven essential micro-services we developed, explain the design choices behind our solution and how it is orchestrated. We evaluate each service in isolation and the entire microservice architecture through two realistic scenarios to show its ability to react and mitigate some performance and security issues thanks to the orchestration. Our results show that μNDN can replace a monolithic NDN forwarder while being more powerful and scalable.

NDN is a promising protocol that can help to reduce congestion at Internet scale by putting content at the center of communications instead of hosts, and by providing each node with a caching capability. NDN can also natively authenticate transmitted content with a mechanism similar to website certificates that allows clients to assess the original provider. But this security feature comes at a high cost, as it relies heavily on asymmetric cryptography which affects server performance when NDN Data are generated. This is particularly critical for many services dealing with real-time data (VOIP, live streaming, etc.), but current tools are not adapted for a realistic server-side performance evaluation of NDN traffic generation when digital signature is used. We propose a new tool, NDNperf, to perform this evaluation and show that creating NDN packets is a major bottleneck of application performances. On our testbed, 14 server cores only generate \textbackslashtextasciitilde400 Mbps of new NDN Data with default packet settings. We propose and evaluate practical solutions to improve the performance of server-side NDN Data generation leading to significant gains.