Flow Processing and the Rise of Commodity Network Hardware

The Internet has seen a proliferation of specialized middle-box devices that carry out crucial network functionality such as load balancing, packet inspection and intrusion detection. Recent advances in CPU power, memory, buses and network connectivity have turned commodity PC hardware into a powerful network platform. Furthermore, commodity switch technologies have recently emerged offering the possibility to control the switching of flows in a fine-grained manner. Exploiting these new technologies, the authors present a new class of network architectures which enables flow processing and forwarding at unprecedented flexibility and low cost.