Enabling fast, dynamic network processing with clickOS.

Middleboxes are both crucial to today's networks and ubiquitous, but embed knowledge of today's protocols and applications to the detriment of those of tomorrow, making the network harder to evolve. SDNs seek to make it easier to extend the network with new functionality, but most of the research effort has focused on the network's control plane, that is, how packets are switched are routed through a SDN. Given the pervasiveness and importance of middleboxes, we believe that a fully programmable network should also be able to dynamically instantiate and quickly move middlebox functionality. In this paper we shift focus towards making the data plane more programmable by introducing ClickOS, a tiny, Xen-based virtual machine that can run a wide range of middleboxes. ClickOS is small (5MB when running), can be instantiated in very small times (roughly 30 milliseconds) and can fill up a 10Gb pipe while concurrently running 128 vms on a low-cost commodity server.