It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the 2016 ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Middleboxes and Network Function Virtualization - HotMiddlebox'16. This year's event is the third workshop on this topic, and it comes at a time when middleboxes are becoming more important and more relevant in both industry and academia.
Modern networks rely heavily on advanced network processing functions for a wide spectrum of crucial functions ranging from security through traffic management, all the way to Voice over IP (just to name few). Until recently, these network functions were implemented in dedicated hardware 'middleboxes' spread within the network. However, the strive to reduce cost and increase agility is motivating a major shift to a paradigm where software based processing runs on virtualized, shared platforms built on commodity hardware servers, switches, and storage.
This trend towards virtualized middleboxes, called Network Function Virtualization, NFV, with the use of Software Defined Networks, SDN to control the network flows is gaining popularity in the telecommunication industry as well as in academia. Yet this paradigm shift is at a very early stage and many interesting questions remain open in this regard. The HotMiddlebox'16 workshop is the venue where ongoing work from both academic and industry addressing various aspects of SDN and NFV virtual boxes is to be presented and discussed.
HotMiddlebox'16 accepted 9 technical papers out of 28 submissions. The paper review process included an evaluation phase by PC members, followed by an online discussion of the top ranked papers, out of which 9 were accepted to appear in the program. The resulting program features a variety of papers focusing on different aspects of middleboxes, from monitoring and management, through privacy, to performance of virtual machines. There is a concentration of papers dealing with network function chains, from both the NFV and the SDN points of view.
HotMiddlebox also features an exciting keynote, presented by Aditya Akella from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Aditya will discuss the meeting point of networking and systems, and how it helps both for SDN as well as for NFV. To further encourage change of ideas, we decided to have an open discussion among authors of the different papers at the end of each technical session. We hope that this will make HotMiddlebox'16 not just a stage to present top results in this area, but also a place where new ideas can incubate and sprout.
Proceeding Downloads
Light at the middle of the tunnel: middleboxes for selective disclosure of network monitoring to distrusted parties
Network monitoring is vital to the administration and operation of networks, but it requires privileged access that only highly trusted parties are granted. This severely limits the opportunity for external parties, such as service or equipment ...
SplitBox: Toward Efficient Private Network Function Virtualization
- Hassan Jameel Asghar,
- Luca Melis,
- Cyril Soldani,
- Emiliano De Cristofaro,
- Mohamed Ali Kaafar,
- Laurent Mathy
This paper presents SplitBox, an efficient system for privacy-preserving processing of network functions that are outsourced as software processes to the cloud. Specifically, cloud providers processing the network functions do not learn the network ...
Measurement Based Fair Queuing for Allocating Bandwidth to Virtual Machines
We wish to allocate outgoing bandwidth at a server among customer VMs. The allocation for each VM is proportional to the bandwidth purchased for that VM by the customer, while allowing idle bandwidth to redistributed. Classical fair queuing in routers ...
Datacenter Scale Load Balancing for Multipath Transport
Multipath TCP traffic is on the rise with recent deployments by Apple and Samsung on mobile phones. Despite this, MPTCP adoption on servers is falling behind and the major problem is that Multipath TCP does not work with existing datacenter load ...
OpenNetVM: A Platform for High Performance Network Service Chains
- Wei Zhang,
- Guyue Liu,
- Wenhui Zhang,
- Neel Shah,
- Phillip Lopreiato,
- Gregoire Todeschi,
- K.K. Ramakrishnan,
- Timothy Wood
Network middleboxes are growing in number and diversity. Middleboxes have been deployed widely to complement the basic end-to-end functionality provided by the Internet Protocol suite that depends only on the minimal functionality of a best-effort ...
Adaptive Service-Chain Routing for Virtual Network Functions in Software-Defined Networks
Software-defined networking is shifting data communication networks toward more centralized control. The availability of virtual machines and lightweight containers enables dynamic placement of virtual network functions on demand. A key challenge is to ...
A Standardized Southbound API for VNF Management
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) offers network operators great flexibility toward managing network functions, i.e. in-network appliances such as firewalls, load balancers and NATs. Several frameworks exist to this end; however VNF management is ...
On the Fly TCP Acceleration with Miniproxy
- Giuseppe Siracusano,
- Roberto Bifulco,
- Simon Kuenzer,
- Stefano Salsano,
- Nicola Blefari Melazzi,
- Felipe Huici
TCP proxies are basic building blocks for many advanced middleboxes. In this paper we present Miniproxy, a TCP proxy built on top of a specialized minimalistic cloud operating system. Miniproxy's connection handling performance is comparable to that of ...
CliMB: Enabling Network Function Composition with Click Middleboxes
Click has significant advantages for middlebox development, including modularity, extensibility, and reprogrammability. Despite these features, Click still has no native TCP support and only uses nonblocking I/O, preventing its applicability to ...
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Acceptance Rates
Year | Submitted | Accepted | Rate |
---|---|---|---|
HotMIddlebox '16 | 28 | 9 | 32% |
HotMiddlebox '15 | 32 | 12 | 38% |
HotMiddlebox '13 | 20 | 8 | 40% |
Overall | 80 | 29 | 36% |