Design and Implementation of Multi-Platform Infrastructure of Extensible Network Functions

Dynamic and flexible composition of higher-level network services, such as security, QoS, or adaptive services are required by future network applications. However, the development of such extensible applications makes them rather complex. In addition, many old applications, which do not support such services, would stick to be used. To solve these problems, we propose a generic and multi-platform infrastructure called FreeNA1 that extends existing applications by transparently incorporating the services to them. FreeNA offers abstract interfaces such that users can insert the services into each packet flow based on a configuration file. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of FreeNA including a functionality comparison with relevant systems, and our performance evaluation results. The result shows that FreeNA offers finer configurability, composability, and usability and can be used widely than other similar systems. We also show that overhead of transparent service insertion is about 1-2% at a maximum compared to a method of inserting such services into applications directly.