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.

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