The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

OpenBox is a framework that makes network functions (NFs) software-defined by decoupling their control plane from their data plane, similarly to SDN solutions that only address the network's forwarding plane. The OpenBox framework consists of a logically-centralized controller, data plane instances, and a communication protocol between them. User-defined NF applications are programmed on top of the northbound API of the controller. We present an extensible and highly modular SDN protocol that allows the controller to define packet processing goals in the data plane. Based on the observation that different NFs carry out similar processing steps, OpenBox reuses processing steps to reduce the overall processing and by that to improve performance and reduce resource consumption. OpenBox is designed to support both hardware and software packet processors, as well as smart NF placement, NF scaling, and multi-tenancy.

Bio:
Yotam Harchol is a Post-Doctoral researcher at the VMware Research Group. He completed his PhD studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research is focused on improved performance and security of network functions and middleboxes.