Delivering high performance when several virtual nodes share the same physical resources requires finding the optimal resource allocation between them. In the context of Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Virtualization, data plane requires the design of a new and more flexible flow packet processing. Virtual nodes involves several packet processing functions such as search operations in different data structures, processing the packets by modifying their respective contents and buffering them. Each packet processing requires a set of shared resources. If there is a conflict for a given resources, resource reassignment strategy is needed to ensure the continuity of the processing and solve resource congestion in accordance with the available hardware resources. In this paper, we propose a resource allocation strategy to share fairly the network processor resources. It is based on network calculus model and game theory algorithms. This strategy maps dynamically the suitable resources according to virtual nodes processing. In our implementation, we focus on packet processing tasks in regard to OpenFlow forwarding model within several processors to reassign resources.

Network operators are faced with the challenge of deploying and managing middleboxes (also called inline services) such as firewalls within their broadband access, datacenter or enterprise networks. Due to the lack of available protocols to route traffic through middleboxes, operators still rely on error-prone and complex low-level configurations to coerce traffic through the desired set of middleboxes. Built upon the recent software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and OpenFlow protocol, this paper proposes StEERING, short for SDN inlinE sERvices and forwardlNG. It is a scalable framework for dynamically routing traffic through any sequence of middleboxes. With simple centralized configuration, StEERING can explicitly steer different types of flows through the desired set of middleboxes, scaling at the level of per-subscriber and per-application policies. With its capability to support flexible routing, we further propose an algorithm to select the best locations for placing services, such that the performance is optimized. Overall, StEERING allows network operators to monetize their middlebox deployment in new ways by allowing subscribers flexibly to select available network services.