Toy Block Networking: Easily Deploying Diverse Network Functions in Programmable Networks

Recent progress on virtualization and deeply programmable network technologies brings opportunities for network operators to flexibly deploy a diverse set of network functions as software-based middle boxes. We present a new deployment and configuration management framework for network functions, called toy block networking. In our framework, an operator can describe its network-wide deployment plan of various network functions by using a unified abstraction representing essential features of composition of network functions, without including the detail of the functions and specific configuration interfaces. This abstraction is based on a network-wide configuration graph that captures the relationships between various network functions, and thus network-wide consistency of their configurations is systematically validated by the framework. Our framework enables the network operator, like building toy blocks into a structure, to compose various network functions from different vendors into a unified network service plan, and deploy them in an operational network.