On-the-Fly TCP Acceleration with Miniproxy

TL;DR

Miniproxy is a minimalistic TCP proxy that offers high performance and rapid deployment, enabling new edge computing and consolidation use cases with a tiny footprint and fast startup time.

Contribution

The paper introduces Miniproxy, a lightweight TCP proxy built on a minimalistic cloud OS, capable of rapid instantiation and suitable for edge computing.

Findings

Comparable performance to full TCP proxies

Requires only 6 MB of memory

Boots in tens of milliseconds

Abstract

TCP proxies are basic building blocks for many advanced middleboxes. In this paper we present Miniproxy, a TCP proxy built on top of a specialized minimalistic cloud operating system. Miniproxy's connection handling performance is comparable to that of full-fledged GNU/Linux TCP proxy implementations, but its minimalistic footprint enables new use cases. Specifically, Miniproxy requires as little as 6 MB to run and boots in tens of milliseconds, enabling massive consolidation, on-the-fly instantiation and edge cloud computing scenarios. We demonstrate the benefits of Miniproxy by implementing and evaluating a TCP acceleration use case.