CoNFV: An Endhost-Cloud Collaborated Network Function Virtualization Framework

The popularity of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is evidenced by its proliferation. There are two existing ways to deploy NFV: in the cloud and at the endhost. However, neither the cloud nor the endhost alone can achieve low latency, low cost and high flexibility simultaneously. In this paper, we propose CoNFV, a framework that combines the cloud and endhosts together, and can achieve all the three goals above. We present a novel NF abstraction that divides NF processing into the cloud-side part and the endhost-side part. CoNFV then incorporates the carefully-designed communication mechanism and offloads the compute-intensive rule generation task to the cloud, which largely reduces the dependency on network bandwidth and also eliminates network latency. Our evaluation result shows that CoNFV is able to reduce latency by 41.8% and reduce the bandwidth usage by 90.6%. To our best knowledge, CoNFV is the first NFV framework that enables endhost-cloud collaboration.