Lightweight Network
Support for Scalable End-to-End Services. Kenneth L. Calvert, James
Griffioen, Su Wen (University of Kentucky). Some end-to-end network services benefit greatly from
network support in terms of utility and scalability. However, when such support is provided
through service-specific mechanisms, the proliferation of one-off solutions
tends to decrease the robustness of the network over time. Programmable
routers, on the other hand, offer generic support for a variety of end-to-end
services, but face a different set of challenges with respect to performance,
scalability, security, and robustness. Ideally, router-based support for
end-to-end services should exhibit the kind of generality, simplicity,
scalability, and performance that made the Internet Protocol (IP) so
successful. In this paper we present a router-based building block called Ephemeral
State Processing (ESP), which is designed to have IP-like characteristics. ESP allows packets to create and manipulate
small amounts of temporary state at routers via short, predefined computations. We discuss the issues involved in the
design of such a service and describe three broad classes of problems for
which ESP enables robust solutions. We
also present performance measurements from a network-processor-based
implementation. Papers are provided as
a service to all by the members of ACM SIGCOMM. This
paper is available in Adobe PDF format. |