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Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Programmable data plane network functions

In the context of the common Inria - Alcatel Lucent Bell-Labs laboratory on Communication networks of the future, we participate to the Content Centric Networking ADR (Action de Recherche). In the context of this ADR, a post-doctoral position is working on the Most network applications and network functions today are implemented using specialized hardware middleboxes. The dedicated specialized hardware makes packet processing rates match that of the line rates that has been difficult to achieve on general purpose hardware. Recently the advancement in general purpose processors has made it possible to use general purpose CPU's for packet processing at line rates. If general purpose CPU's can replace dedicated hardware, this will drastically reduces the cost as the network functions can be moved from dedicated hardware to software. Currently, Virtualization has been promoted to realize network functions on general purpose computing devices and this currently popular in both academia and industry. There are a number of problems with using virtualization to realize network functions, the most important being the latency introduced by the software stacks. In this work, we will be looking at alternative approaches to implementing network functions on general purpose hardware. One of the main outcomes will be an approach that performs much better than the existing solutions. One of the goals of the work will be to find appropriate use cases for which the proposed architecture is a clear advantage with respect to other NFV solutions. Alcatel Lucent has joined Nokia in 2015. See http://company.nokia.com/en .