It's a Match! Near-Optimal and Incremental Middlebox Deployment

摘要

Network functions or middleboxes can be used to manipulate packets and flows in sophisticated ways to improve security, performance and general network management. They are virtually ubiquitous in modern computer networks and increasingly more flexible as they become software-defined and virtualized. Through software-defined networking, operators can route traffic through arbitrary paths across chains of middleboxes to enforce policies or manage the middleboxes' load. Before enabling such interesting functionality, however, one has to decide where to place these middleboxes in the network.