Support for Dynamic Adaptation in Next Generation Packet Processing Systems

Designs of next-generation Internet architectures propose a diverse and changing set of features in the data path of routers. These routers require high-performance programmable packet processing platforms to allow for dynamic feature deployment and adaptation. In this paper, the authors present programming abstractions that quantifies processing and storage of network services. They further devise a runtime environment that provides the ability of adaptation to dynamically deployed network services and varying network traffic. In recent years, additions to the data path feature set of routers (i.e., firewall, intrusion detection, network address translation, etc.) has brought the need for flexibility in design of processing nodes inside networks.