While the network edge is becoming more important for the provision of customized services in next generation mobile networks, current NFV architectures are unsuitable to meet the increasing future demand. They rely on commodity servers with resource-hungry Virtual Machines that are unable to provide the high network function density and mobility requirements necessary for upcoming wide-area and 5G networks.



In this demo, we showcase Glasgow Network Functions (GNF), a virtualization framework suitable for next generation mobile networks that exploits lightweight network functions (NFs) deployed at the edge and transparently following  users' devices as they roam between cells

Cziva, Richard

Jouet, Simon

Pezaros, Dimitrios P.

English

Enlighten: Publications

  
 
 
 
 
Cziva, R., Jouet, S., and Pezaros, D. P. (2016) Roaming Edge vNFs using Glasgow 
Network Functions. In: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication 
(SIGCOMM), Florianopolis, Brazil, 22-26 Aug 2016, pp. 601-602. ISBN 
9781450341936. 
 
   
There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are 
advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. 
 
© The Authors 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for 
your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was 
published in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Launceston, 
Tasmania, Australia, Florianopolis, Brazil, 22-26 Aug 2016, pp. 601-602. ISBN 
9781450341936, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2934872.2959067.   
 
 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/121214/ 
     
 
 
 
 
 
 
Deposited on: 20 July 2016 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow 
http://eprints.gla.ac.uk 
Roaming Edge vNFs using
Glasgow Network Functions
Richard Cziva, Simon Jouet, Dimitrios P Pezaros
Networked Systems Research Laboratory, University of Glasgow, UK
richard.cziva@glasgow.ac.uk, simon.jouet@glasgow.ac.uk, dimitrios.pezaros@glasgow.ac.uk
Categories and Subject Descriptors
C.2.3 [Network Operations]: Network Management
1. INTRODUCTION
The significant growth in mobile data consumption
driven by the exponential penetration of smart devices
running resource-intensive applications poses serious chal-
lenges to the infrastructure and its dynamic (re)configuration.
It is predicted that 50 billion connected devices will
be exchanging Zettabytes of traffic between them by
2020. However, more than 70% of mobile data con-
sumption is expected to be highly localized, occurring
indoors in homes, offices, shopping centers, and other
public places [4]. The 5G mobile network architecture
is being designed to support the emerging requirements
mentioned above. As shown in Fig. 1, 5G networks
will utilize smaller and denser network cells that com-
bine various access technologies (e.g., licensed LTE or
millimeter-wave), and will introduce compute nodes at
the “network edge” to offload the core network and pro-
vide customized services to users at low latency and
high throughput [1]. Such nodes at the network edge
will be diverse, ranging from low-cost customer equip-
ment to high-end servers. Low-overhead and high-density
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) frameworks can
therefore leverage resources at the edge by dynamically
allocating network services such as firewalls, caches, rate
limiters, etc., and remove the need for dedicated hard-
ware which would be prohibitively expensive if not im-
possible to deploy over such large-scale distributed setup.
Using commodity hosting platforms, network services
can be placed on demand to optimized locations, reduc-
ing capital and operational expenditure and resulting in
a more efficient network-wide resource utilization. How-
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal
or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or
distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice
and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of
this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).
SIGCOMM’16, August 22–26, 2016, Florianopolis, Brazil.
c© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4193-6/16/08. . . $15.00
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2934872.2959067
Figure 1: High-level view of 5G networks with
example network functions at the edge.
ever, current network edge services and NFV frame-
works (e.g., OpenEdge or ClickOS) either rely on spe-
cialised hypervisors or utilise commodity x86 servers us-
ing resource-hungry Virtual Machines, preventing their
use in future wide-area and 5G networks where high
network function density and mobility is paramount.
In this demo, we showcase Glasgow Network Func-
tions (GNF) [3], a virtualization framework for next
generation mobile networks that exploits lightweight vir-
tual network functions (NFs or vNFs) deployed at the
edge. GNF has the following main characteristics:
Minimal footprint: GNF has been designed to run
at very low-cost allowing its deployment on commodity
and low-end devices.
Container-based: Network functions are encapsu-
lated in lightweight Linux containers to provide fast in-
stantiation time, platform-independence, high through-
put and low resource utilization.
Function roaming: With its small footprint and
encapsulated functions, GNF seamlessly moves the NFs
when the user roams between cells, providing consistent
and location-transparent service.
Transparent traffic handling: Providers can trans-
parently attach and remove NFs to the clients without
adversely impacting the flow of traffic.
2. CONTAINER-BASED NFV
While different software-based NF implementations
such as ClickOS, FlowOS or Vyatta exist, they run on
customized platforms or hypervisors preventing widely
used applications and tools to be deployed without mod-
ification. GNF uses Linux containers that provide a
lightweight equivalent to virtual machines, allowing each
container to use the host OS kernel to isolate processes,
network routing tables, and their associated resources.
This approach does not require each isolated function
to run on a separate OS image, hence allowing a much
higher network function-to-host density and smaller foot-
print at the cost of reduced isolation. Using containers,
commodity compute devices (or public cloud VMs [2])
are now able to host up to hundreds of NFs.
The minimal cost of starting and stopping containers
as well as the single package encapsulation allows for
NFs to roam alongside the client. As the client roams
between cells, an equivalent function can be started on
the newly assigned cell and removed from the previous
cell.
3. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
GNF consists of three well-defined components: the
Manager, the Agent, and the User Interface (UI).
The Manager, allows single or chain of NFs to be as-
sociated with a subset of a selected client’s traffic. This
is achieved by providing a set of APIs to control the
state of NFs’ containers across all stations and keeping
a connection with all the Agents in the network. The
Manager is also responsible for continuously monitoring
the health and resource utilization from the GNF sta-
tions, allowing the provider to detect resource-hotspots
and therefore the part of the infrastructure that should
be upgraded. Using the same API, individual NFs can
relay notifications through their local Agent to the Man-
ager, informing the provider about events that should
be reviewed such as an unexpected or inconsistent NF
state or expected but anomalous events such as an in-
trusion attempt or detected malware.
A GNF Agent is a lightweight daemon running on
the stations managed by the provider. It is responsible
for the instantiation of the NFs on the hosting plat-
form (e.g., edge router, access point, Internet gateway),
notifying the Manager of clients’ (dis)connection and
reporting periodically the state of the device. When a
NF is requested by the provider, the Manager notifies
the closest Agent that retrieves (if not already hosted
locally) the NF from a central repository and starts it
in a container. Apart from starting and stopping NFs,
the Agent is responsible for setting up the containers’
local virtual interfaces. All containers are connected to
the local software switch by two virtual Ethernet pairs
(for ingress/egress traffic, respectively).
The UI provides the overall management interface
for the system through a direct connection to the Man-
ager’s API. Using a simple interface, the entire network
Figure 2: Architecture and demo of GNF. When
a client roams between networks, associated NFs
seamlessly migrate with it.
health, status, and notifications can be monitored, in-
cluding the number of online stations, connected clients,
enabled NFs, and current processing and network re-
source consumption. New NFs can be attached in sec-
onds or removed from clients as well as scheduled to be
enabled only during specific time periods.
4. MOBILITY USE-CASE
As a proof of concept demonstration, we are present-
ing the migration of multiple lightweight NFs attached
to mobile clients (smartphones) roaming between wire-
less networks. Throughout the demo, our UI will be
used to both show real-time statistics (network traffic,
CPU load, memory usage) as well as to assign (deploy)
NFs to wireless clients. NFs will be hosted on off-the-
shelf home routers (TP-Link WDR3600) with Open-
WRT compiled to support the containers and all of the
Linux utilities (such as ip, tc, nfqueue) our NFs use.
A high-level overview of the demo setup is shown in
Fig. 2. The available GNF NFs include an iptables-
based packet firewall, a HTTP filter and a DNS load
balancer1.
A video presenting the mobility use-case and the UI
can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/R7PimtddIXo.
5. REFERENCES
[1] B. Bangerter, S. Talwar, R. Arefi, and K. Stewart.
Networks and devices for the 5g era. Communications
Magazine, IEEE, 52(2):90–96, 2014.
[2] R. Cziva, S. Jouet, and D. P. Pezaros. Gnfc: Towards
network function cloudification. In IEEE NFV-SDN,
2016.
[3] R. Cziva, S. Jouet, K. J. S. White, and D. P. Pezaros.
Container-based Network Function Virtualization for
Software-Defined Networks. In IEEE ISCC, 2015.
[4] Qualcomm. 1000x: More Small Cells whitepaper, 2014.
1All GNF NFs can be found at:
https://github.com/glanf/


Roaming Edge vNFs using Glasgow Network Functions

Richard Cziva

Simon Jouet

Dimitrios P Pezaros

Crossref

Enlighten

      Cziva, R., Jouet, S., and Pezaros, D. P. (2016) Roaming Edge vNFs using Glasgow Network Functions. In: ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM), Florianopolis, Brazil, 22-26 Aug 2016, pp. 601-602. ISBN 9781450341936.     There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.  © The Authors 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGCOMM Conference, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, Florianopolis, Brazil, 22-26 Aug 2016, pp. 601-602. ISBN 9781450341936, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2934872.2959067.     http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/121214/            Deposited on: 20 July 2016                       Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Roaming Edge vNFs usingGlasgow Network FunctionsRichard Cziva, Simon Jouet, Dimitrios P PezarosNetworked Systems Research Laboratory, University of Glasgow, UKrichard.cziva@glasgow.ac.uk, simon.jouet@glasgow.ac.uk, dimitrios.pezaros@glasgow.ac.ukCategories and Subject DescriptorsC.2.3 [Network Operations]: Network Management1. INTRODUCTIONThe significant growth in mobile data consumptiondriven by the exponential penetration of smart devicesrunning resource-intensive applications poses serious chal-lenges to the infrastructure and its dynamic (re)configuration.It is predicted that 50 billion connected devices willbe exchanging Zettabytes of traffic between them by2020. However, more than 70% of mobile data con-sumption is expected to be highly localized, occurringindoors in homes, offices, shopping centers, and otherpublic places [4]. The 5G mobile network architectureis being designed to support the emerging requirementsmentioned above. As shown in Fig. 1, 5G networkswill utilize smaller and denser network cells that com-bine various access technologies (e.g., licensed LTE ormillimeter-wave), and will introduce compute nodes atthe “network edge” to oﬄoad the core network and pro-vide customized services to users at low latency andhigh throughput [1]. Such nodes at the network edgewill be diverse, ranging from low-cost customer equip-ment to high-end servers. Low-overhead and high-densityNetwork Function Virtualization (NFV) frameworks cantherefore leverage resources at the edge by dynamicallyallocating network services such as firewalls, caches, ratelimiters, etc., and remove the need for dedicated hard-ware which would be prohibitively expensive if not im-possible to deploy over such large-scale distributed setup.Using commodity hosting platforms, network servicescan be placed on demand to optimized locations, reduc-ing capital and operational expenditure and resulting ina more efficient network-wide resource utilization. How-Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personalor classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made ordistributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this noticeand the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components ofthis work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).SIGCOMM’16, August 22–26, 2016, Florianopolis, Brazil.c© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-4193-6/16/08. . . $15.00DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2934872.2959067Figure 1: High-level view of 5G networks withexample network functions at the edge.ever, current network edge services and NFV frame-works (e.g., OpenEdge or ClickOS) either rely on spe-cialised hypervisors or utilise commodity x86 servers us-ing resource-hungry Virtual Machines, preventing theiruse in future wide-area and 5G networks where highnetwork function density and mobility is paramount.In this demo, we showcase Glasgow Network Func-tions (GNF) [3], a virtualization framework for nextgeneration mobile networks that exploits lightweight vir-tual network functions (NFs or vNFs) deployed at theedge. GNF has the following main characteristics:Minimal footprint: GNF has been designed to runat very low-cost allowing its deployment on commodityand low-end devices.Container-based: Network functions are encapsu-lated in lightweight Linux containers to provide fast in-stantiation time, platform-independence, high through-put and low resource utilization.Function roaming: With its small footprint andencapsulated functions, GNF seamlessly moves the NFswhen the user roams between cells, providing consistentand location-transparent service.Transparent traffic handling: Providers can trans-parently attach and remove NFs to the clients withoutadversely impacting the flow of traffic.2. CONTAINER-BASED NFVWhile different software-based NF implementationssuch as ClickOS, FlowOS or Vyatta exist, they run oncustomized platforms or hypervisors preventing widelyused applications and tools to be deployed without mod-ification. GNF uses Linux containers that provide alightweight equivalent to virtual machines, allowing eachcontainer to use the host OS kernel to isolate processes,network routing tables, and their associated resources.This approach does not require each isolated functionto run on a separate OS image, hence allowing a muchhigher network function-to-host density and smaller foot-print at the cost of reduced isolation. Using containers,commodity compute devices (or public cloud VMs [2])are now able to host up to hundreds of NFs.The minimal cost of starting and stopping containersas well as the single package encapsulation allows forNFs to roam alongside the client. As the client roamsbetween cells, an equivalent function can be started onthe newly assigned cell and removed from the previouscell.3. DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATIONGNF consists of three well-defined components: theManager, the Agent, and the User Interface (UI).The Manager, allows single or chain of NFs to be as-sociated with a subset of a selected client’s traffic. Thisis achieved by providing a set of APIs to control thestate of NFs’ containers across all stations and keepinga connection with all the Agents in the network. TheManager is also responsible for continuously monitoringthe health and resource utilization from the GNF sta-tions, allowing the provider to detect resource-hotspotsand therefore the part of the infrastructure that shouldbe upgraded. Using the same API, individual NFs canrelay notifications through their local Agent to the Man-ager, informing the provider about events that shouldbe reviewed such as an unexpected or inconsistent NFstate or expected but anomalous events such as an in-trusion attempt or detected malware.A GNF Agent is a lightweight daemon running onthe stations managed by the provider. It is responsiblefor the instantiation of the NFs on the hosting plat-form (e.g., edge router, access point, Internet gateway),notifying the Manager of clients’ (dis)connection andreporting periodically the state of the device. When aNF is requested by the provider, the Manager notifiesthe closest Agent that retrieves (if not already hostedlocally) the NF from a central repository and starts itin a container. Apart from starting and stopping NFs,the Agent is responsible for setting up the containers’local virtual interfaces. All containers are connected tothe local software switch by two virtual Ethernet pairs(for ingress/egress traffic, respectively).The UI provides the overall management interfacefor the system through a direct connection to the Man-ager’s API. Using a simple interface, the entire networkFigure 2: Architecture and demo of GNF. Whena client roams between networks, associated NFsseamlessly migrate with it.health, status, and notifications can be monitored, in-cluding the number of online stations, connected clients,enabled NFs, and current processing and network re-source consumption. New NFs can be attached in sec-onds or removed from clients as well as scheduled to beenabled only during specific time periods.4. MOBILITY USE-CASEAs a proof of concept demonstration, we are present-ing the migration of multiple lightweight NFs attachedto mobile clients (smartphones) roaming between wire-less networks. Throughout the demo, our UI will beused to both show real-time statistics (network traffic,CPU load, memory usage) as well as to assign (deploy)NFs to wireless clients. NFs will be hosted on off-the-shelf home routers (TP-Link WDR3600) with Open-WRT compiled to support the containers and all of theLinux utilities (such as ip, tc, nfqueue) our NFs use.A high-level overview of the demo setup is shown inFig. 2. The available GNF NFs include an iptables-based packet firewall, a HTTP filter and a DNS loadbalancer1.A video presenting the mobility use-case and the UIcan be viewed at: https://youtu.be/R7PimtddIXo.5. REFERENCES[1] B. Bangerter, S. Talwar, R. Arefi, and K. Stewart.Networks and devices for the 5g era. CommunicationsMagazine, IEEE, 52(2):90–96, 2014.[2] R. Cziva, S. Jouet, and D. P. Pezaros. Gnfc: Towardsnetwork function cloudification. In IEEE NFV-SDN,2016.[3] R. Cziva, S. Jouet, K. J. S. White, and D. P. Pezaros.Container-based Network Function Virtualization forSoftware-Defined Networks. In IEEE ISCC, 2015.[4] Qualcomm. 1000x: More Small Cells whitepaper, 2014.1All GNF NFs can be found at:https://github.com/glanf/

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Roaming Edge vNFs using Glasgow Network Functions

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