NFlow and MVT Abstractions for NFV Scaling

The ability to dynamically scale in/out network functions (NFs) on multiple cores/servers to meet traffic demands is a key benefit of network function virtualization (NFV). The stateful NF operations make NFV scaling a challenging task: if care is not taken, NFV scaling can lead to incorrect operations and poor performance. We advocate two general abstractions, NFLOW and Match-Value Table (MVT), for NFV packet processing pipelines. We present formal definitions of the abstractions and discuss how they can facilitate NFV scaling by minimizing or eliminating shared states. Using NFs implemented with the proposed abstractions, we conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate their efficacy in terms of correctness and performance of NFV scaling.