Service Chaining for Heterogeneous Middleboxes

In this paper, we describe a new session-level approach for network function virtualization that steers packets through both FPGA- and processor-based middleboxes. We support inter-domain service chaining, dynamic modification of service chains for ongoing sessions, and application of session-level approaches for UDP-based protocols. To demonstrate our approach, we establish and dynamically update inter-domain service chains for QUIC protocol sessions across a scalable set of FPGA- and processor-based middleboxes. The middleboxes implemented with distributed agents show 96% better latency and 10% better throughput than accelerated software for a firewall application.