@inproceedings{ballani2015enabling,
author = {Ballani, Hitesh and Costa, Paolo and Gkantsidis, Christos and Grosvenor, Matthew P. and Karagiannis, Thomas and Koromilas, Lazaros and O'Shea, Greg},
title = {Enabling End-host Network Functions},
booktitle = {SIGCOMM 2015},
year = {2015},
month = {August},
abstract = {Many network functions executed in modern datacenters, e.g., load balancing, application-level QoS, and congestion control, exhibit three common properties at the data plane: they need to access and modify state, to perform computations, and to access application semantics --- this is critical since many network functions are best expressed in terms of application-level messages. In this paper, we argue that the end hosts are a natural enforcement point for these functions and we present Eden, an architecture for implementing network functions at end hosts with minimal network support.

Eden comprises three components, a centralized controller, an enclave at each end host, and Eden-compliant applications called stages. To implement network functions, the controller configures stages to classify their data into messages and the enclaves to apply action functions based on a packet's class. Our Eden prototype includes enclaves implemented both in the OS kernel and on programmable NICs. Through case studies, we show how application-level classification and the ability to run actual programs on the data-path allows Eden to efficiently support a broad range of network functions at the network's edge.},
publisher = {ACM - Association for Computing Machinery},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/enabling-end-host-network-functions/},
edition = {SIGCOMM 2015},
}