Redundant Logic Elimination in Network Functions

In current NFV ecosystem, most software NFs delivered by NF vendors tend to be monolithic with multiple features. In runtime, an NF is configured with a subset of its features turned on/off. By our code analysis and primary test, we find that some of the (runtime) unused features are executed silently, which wastes CPU cycles and memory. We propose to use program analysis techniques to eliminate runtime redundant logic in NF code so that the NF performance can be accelerated. We prototype our idea and test it on Snort to show the feasibility.