Stellar: A stateful network functions development platform

A stateful network function could be a firewall, a load balancer, or an IDS.

Architecture

The stellar components are:

• Packet IO built an abstraction of network IO devices.
• Session Manager has a hash table for tracking sessions. The caller feeds packets to the session manager and may return triggered session events.
• Plugin Manager loads C/Lua plugins and manages per-plugin, per-session context. When the caller feeds an event to the plugin manager, it invokes plugin callbacks.
• Protocol Decoders are libraries that parse and extract information from the packet payload.
• Active Queue Management is queue management algorithm libraries that schedule packets by buffering, forwarding, marking, or dropping. A plugin creates a queue instance and enqueues packets as its needs.
  • Question: Who consumes the dequeue events?