Research And Implementation Of NFV Control Plane Data Plane Separation And State Migration

With the rise of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds, the data center network carries more and much more workloads. It leads to the continuously increasing demands of network functions. The telecom service providers’network generally adopts a large number of special-purpose networking hardware equipments. Due to the constant change of the business requirements, networking equipment types also increase. These factors lead to increasing capital investment of the telecommunication service operators. At the same time, it is too difficult for the telecom service operators to operate the special-purpose networking equipments due to their special properties. In October 2012, a specification group made up of representatives from the telecommucation industry, "Network Functions Virtualisation", published a white paper. The network architecture of NFV is using the technologies of IT virtualization to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create communication services. Network functions (also named middlebox) vary a lot. Separating the control plane and the data plane of middlebox while developing middleboxes using the technology of NFV is still lack of a corresponding standard and a method of separation. The separation can make middleboxes easy to deploy in the data center network and scale out. Besides, it can provide a very good platform for the upper application development implementation of new network functions. Due to middlebox migration in the data center network, the state migration across middleboxes has some issues. This paper puts forward the method of separation of control plane and data plane, state classification and state migration method. And we implement several middleboxes; separations on the Click Router platform. Finaly we confirm the result of separation of control plane and data plane, and test the state migration.