BASIC INFORMATION
Short name: FB-FIRE
Long name: Assessment of FlowBlaze on Fed4FIRE+
Company: Axbryd | axbryd.com
Country: Italy
Call: F4Fp-04-M (see call details)
Proposal number: F4Fp-04-M25
SUMMARY REMARKS & TESTBEDS
Network Function Virtualization is a fundamental element to provide an efficient network infrastructure inline with the 5G requirements. However, its benefits can be quickly jeopardized if the performance requirements of virtual network functions are not met. Recent advances in software development techniques for packet IO and processing have allowed developers to build functions that meet the required level of performance, nonetheless, programming such functions is complex, troublesome and lengthy, with the additional complexity of requiring very specialized skills, which are hard to find on the market and difficult to develop. This project aims to test, validate and assess in the Fed4FIRE+ Virtual Wall testbed the performance of FlowBlaze, a novel stateful programmable dataplane engine that can address the above issues. FlowBlaze is an abstraction that can be implemented in an efficient DPDK-accelerated software engine, conceived to rapidly design and deploy complex network functions hiding the complexity of software optimizations associated to the development of network functions. The project will deploy and evaluate a set of network functions such as load balancing, QoS policier and a Traffic off loader for Mobile Edge Cloud. The performance evaluation of the network functions will allow to assess the efficiency and scalability of the the FlowBlaze engine. Furthermore, the integration of FlowBlaze into the Fed4FIRE+ testbed will provide a method to quickly develop and deploy efficient network functions.