No more middlebox: integrate processing into network
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2010 conference
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Network device vendors have recently opened up the processing capabilities on their hardware platform to support third-party applications. In this paper, we explore the requirements and overheads associated with co-locating middlebox functionality on such computing resources on networking hardware. In particular, we use an example of TCP acceleration proxy (CHART) that improves throughput over networks with delay and loss. The CHART system, developed by HP and its partners provides enhanced TCP/IP performance and service quality guarantees by deploying performance accelerating proxies, which enables legacy clients to benefit by high-performance network service. Use of the TCP proxy, however, requires manual configuration on the clients changing http proxy and/or routing table settings. Can we remove the need to configure end-hosts by inserting a {\em transparent} TCP proxy in the path, without losing performance? To address this question, we implement the accelerator on HP's x86-based processing blade designed to integrate network applications within switch architecture as well as on low-end home routers with OpenWRT. We describe the implementation detail such as flow redirection for transparency and new mechanisms required for easy insertion of proxies in the network path. We also evaluate its performance on HP's experimental testbed in terms of throughput and additional processing overhead.