Design and Implementation of a Framework for Software-Defined Middlebox Networking

Abstract

Increasingly, middleboxes are being deployed as software components and, with the advent of software defined networking, can be deployed at arbitrary locations. However, existing approaches for controlling the operations of middleboxes continue to be rudimentary and ad hoc. As such, a variety of dynamic network control scenarios that are crucial to enhancing the security, availability and performance of enterprise applications cannot be realized today. In this paper, we ask: what is the right way to exercise unified control over the actions of middlebox that enables sophisticated dynamic network control scenarios? Inspired by SDN, we argue that a software-defined middlebox networking (SDMBN) framework?which provides fine-grained, programmatic control over all MB state in concert with control over the network?is the answer to this question. Thus, we present the design and implementation of OpenMB. OpenMB consists of slightly modified middleboxes that expose a southbound API for importing/exporting middlebox state, a middlebox controller that implements a northbound API to define how state can be accessed or placed, and scenario-specific control applications that orchestrate middlebox and network changes in tandem.