Heterogeneous network policy enforcement in data centers

With the emergence of network function virtualization, data center start to deploy a variety of network function boxes (NFBs) in both physical and virtual form factors in order to combines inherent efficiency offered by physical NFBs with the agility and flexibility of virtual ones. However, existing schemes are limited to exclusively consider physical or virtual NFBs, which may reduce the performance efficiency of services running atop. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous NetwOrk Policy Enforcement scheme (HOPE) to overcome these challenges. An efficient algorithm that can closely approximate optimal latencywise NF service chaining is proposed. The experimental results have also shown that HOPE can outperform greedy algorithm by 25% in terms of network latency and is 56x more efficient than naive depth-first search algorithm.