SALMA: A Novel Middlebox Infrastructure System Based on Integrated Subnets

Abstract

Middleboxes are critical components in today’s networks. Due to the variety of network/security policies and the limitations of routing protocols, middleboxes are installed in multiple physical locations to face high traffic with few considerations for efficiency. Reducing the number of deployed middleboxes would reduce capital and operation costs. Moreover, some flows prefer to bypass one or more in-path middlebox where they provide useless services, such as payload compression for multimedia streams. These challenges can be partially tackled by network function virtualization (NFV) schemes with the costs of performance reduction and replacement expenses. Given the rapid growth and the wide adoption of software-defined networking solutions and the recent advances in managing middleboxes’ configuration, the consolidation of middleboxes is becoming easier than before. We designed and evaluated SALMA, a new pre-NFV practical solution that systematically recreates the infrastructure of middleboxes by proposing the Integrated Middleboxes Subnets scheme. In this work, we attempted to reduce the number of installed middleboxes by implementing horizontal integration of middleboxes’ functions, such as every pair of middleboxes being integrated into a dedicated hardware box. We support the motivation for creating SALMA with a practical survey of in-production middleboxes from 30 enterprises. Our solution addresses key challenges of middleboxes, including cost, utilization, flexibility, and load balancing. SALMA’s performance has been evaluated experimentally as well.