A Research And Design Of OpenFlow-based Service Function Chain

Service Function Chain (SFC, for short) requires specific traffic to be steered to go through sequenced service nodes, such as firewall and load balancer. In traditional SFC implementations, the flexibility is quite limited and they usually depend on lots of manual configurations. With the combination of Network Function Virtualization (NFV for short) and Software Definde-Networking(SDN for short), SFC could be implemented in a more flexible and automated way.This paper presents a comprehensive and deep survey on existing academic researches and industry implementations of SFC, and gives an abstract of the key technologies in SFC system, such as the system modules and interfaces, the traffic classification and steering, insertion of service nodes, and so on. And it provides a theoretical principle for the following design in the paper.In latter section, a new OpenFlow-based SFC design is proposed for data center, with a main approach of MAC re-coding, which could support all the base and extended functions of SFC. Comparing with the Network Service Header (NSH, for short) proposed by IETF,our design avoids the undesirable compute and network costs introduced by the new header of NSH, and it is more friendly to traditional L2 Ethernet switches, which means a less expenditure of the SFC system.