PBox: Cross-Switch Pipeline Orchestration for Accelerated Service Function Chaining in High-Performance Cloud Networks
Bo Pang, Deyun Gao, Weiting Zhang, Ruichen Zhang, Dusit Tao Niyato, Hongke Zhang · IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing · 2026
The rise of latency-sensitive and bandwidth-intensive services has driven hardware accelerator adoption in cloud networks. Programmable data plane (PDP) switches achieve significant performance gains in high-performance cloud computing but face fixed pipeline constraints that limit flexibility in multi-tenant service function chaining (SFC) with dynamic function compositions. Existing approaches either exhaust resources through redundant embeddings or degrade performance via packet recirculation. This paper presents PBox, a framework enabling flexible SFC orchestration across multiple PDP switches by optimizing network function (NF) execution orders to minimize pipeline traversals-the dominant end-to-end processing delay source. This requires co-designing NF embedding with routing strategies. PBox contributes: (i) an optimized Network Service Header design supporting one-pass matching of multiple NFs through per-bit activation, reducing packet matching overhead by 45-60%; (ii) a nested optimization formulation capturing interdependence between long-term pipeline orchestration and short-term flow routing decisions; and (iii) a sampling-based genetic algorithm with statistical robustness guarantees, achieving fast switch configuration while adapting to dynamic service patterns. Evaluations on BMv2 and Intel Tofino demonstrate 33-79% completion time reduction, 46% capacity increase, and 78% line-rate efficiency, validating cloud-scale deployment potential.