No More Middlebox: Integrate Processing Into Network

Traditionally, in-network services like firewall, proxy, cache, and transcoders have been provided by dedicated hardware middleboxes. A recent trend has been to remove the middleboxes by deploying the network services into switch/router-integrated computing modules or separate server/blade machines. In this paper, by using a web Ad-insertion application as an example, the authors demonstrate their In-Network Processing (INP) framework that orchestrates various computing resources and network devices and enables seamless and efficient deployments of network services.