Pushing Services to the Edge Using a Stateful Programmable Dataplane

Offloading to the edge a subset of the cloud services requested by users is a very appealing solution to reduce the bandwidth pressure, minimize latency and improve the overall quality of experience of mobile users. Achieving this goal is technically challenging, since the network functionalities needed to manage this offloading are not trivial, and present significant requirements in terms of scalability and speed. We propose to realize these network functionalities directly in the dataplane, exploiting the characteristic of FlowBlaze, a novel stateful programmable dataplane. Furthermore, we show how the network functions for the traffic offload can be easily expressed using an ad-hoc domain specific language developed for the description of per-flow stateful network functions.