Should the network be dumb or smart? Network vendors have recently focused on making the network as smart as possible because there is a definite feeling that dumb networks are quickly becoming a commodity—and it’s hard to see where and how steep profit margins can be maintained in a commodifying market. Software vendors, on the other hand, have been encroaching on the network space by “building in” overlay network capabilities, especially in virtualization products. VMWare and Docker come immediately to mind; both are either able to, or working towards, running on a plain IP fabric, reducing the number of services provided by the network to a minimum level (of course, I’d have a lot more confidence in these overlay systems if they were a lot smarter about routing … but I’ll leave that alone for the moment).

How can this question be answered? One way is to think through what sorts of things need to be done in processing packets, and then think through where it makes most sense to do those things. Another way is to measure the accuracy or speed at which some of these “packet processing things” can be done so you can decide in a more empirical way. The paper I’m looking at today, by Anirudh et al., takes both of these paths in order to create a baseline “rule of thumb” about where to place packet processing functionality in a network.

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