Specialized network appliances or "middleboxes" are expensive and closed systems with little/no hooks for extension; they come with custom management APIs and are deployed as standalone devices with little cohesiveness in how the ensemble of middleboxes is managed. These drawbacks put network infrastructure on a trajectory of growing device sprawl with mounting capital and management costs. This research introduces a new approach to building and managing middlebox infrastructure. Instead of an ad-hoc clutter of specialized and standalone boxes, the research develops a middlebox architecture in which software-centric middlebox applications run consolidated on a shared hardware platform, managed by a single, unified controller. This approach offers extensibility (since new applications are deployed on existing hardware and integrated into a unified management architecture) and yet efficiency (due to amortization of both hardware and management overheads).
Broader Impact: Modern society's growing reliance on networked systems has been astounding. This growth has not come easily however. Today's networks are highly complex systems and middleboxes are a significant contributor to this complexity; even the experts that build and run networks struggle to manage and diagnose their operation. Spiraling costs related to the manageability and evolution of networks impacts the networking industry and hence eventually the broader society that relies on them. This research aims to ameliorate this trajectory through a simpler, unified design for middlebox infrastructure.
