| Title | Dynamic Service Chaining with Dysco |
| Publication Type | Conference Paper |
| Year of Publication | 2017 |
| Authors | Zave, Pamela, Ferreira, Ronaldo A., Zou, Xuan Kelvin, Morimoto, Masaharu, Rexford, Jennifer |
| Conference Name | Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication |
| Publisher | ACM |
| Conference Location | New York, NY, USA |
| ISBN Number | 978-1-4503-4653-5 |
| Keywords | composability, Concurrency, Cyber-physical systems, Metrics, NFV, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, security, Session Protocol, SPIN, verification |
| Abstract | Middleboxes are crucial for improving network security and performance, but only if the right traffic goes through the right middleboxes at the right time. Existing traffic-steering techniques rely on a central controller to install fine-grained forwarding rules in network elements--at the expense of a large number of rules, a central point of failure, challenges in ensuring all packets of a session traverse the same middleboxes, and difficulties with middleboxes that modify the "five tuple." We argue that a session-level protocol is a fundamentally better approach to traffic steering, while naturally supporting host mobility and multihoming in an integrated fashion. In addition, a session-level protocol can enable new capabilities like dynamic service chaining, where the sequence of middleboxes can change during the life of a session, e.g., to remove a load-balancer that is no longer needed, replace a middlebox undergoing maintenance, or add a packet scrubber when traffic looks suspicious. Our Dysco protocol steers the packets of a TCP session through a service chain, and can dynamically reconfigure the chain for an ongoing session. Dysco requires no changes to end-host and middlebox applications, host TCP stacks, or IP routing. Dysco's distributed reconfiguration protocol handles the removal of proxies that terminate TCP connections, middleboxes that change the size of a byte stream, and concurrent requests to reconfigure different parts of a chain. Through formal verification using Spin and experiments with our Linux-based prototype, we show that Dysco is provably correct, highly scalable, and able to reconfigure service chains across a range of middleboxes. |
| URL | http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3098822.3098827 |
| DOI | 10.1145/3098822.3098827 |
| Citation Key | zave_dynamic_2017 |
Dynamic Service Chaining with Dysco