NFVactor: A Resilient NFV System Using the Distributed Actor Model

Abstract

Resilience functionality, including failure resilience and flow migration, is of pivotal importance in practical network function virtualization (NFV) systems. However, existing failure recovery procedures incur high packet processing delay due to heavyweight process checkpointing, while flow migration has poor performance due to centralized control. This paper proposes NFVactor, a novel NFV system that aims to provide lightweight failure resilience and high-performance flow migration. NFVactor enables these by using actor model to provide a per-flow execution environment, so that each flow can replicate and migrate itself with improved parallelism, while the efficiency of the actor model is guaranteed by a carefully designed runtime system. Moreover, NFVactor achieves transparent resilience: once a new network function (NF) is implemented for NFVactor, the NF automatically acquires resilience support. Our evaluation result shows that NFVactor achieves 10-Gbps packet processing, flow migration completion time that is 144 times faster than the existing system, and packet processing delay stabilized at around 20 \mu \text{s} during replication.