Central Control over Distributed Service Function Path

Abstract

Service Function Chaining (SFC) supports services through linking an ordered list of functions. There may be multiple instances of the same function, which provides a challenge to select available instances for all the functions in an SFC and generate a specific Service Function Path (SFP). Aiming to solve the problem of SFP selection, we propose an architecture consisting of distributed SFP algorithm and central control mechanism. Nodes generate distributed routings based on the first function and destination node in each service request. Controller supervises all of the distributed routing tables and modifies paths as required. The architecture is scalable, robust and quickly reacts to failures because of distributed routings. Besides, it enables centralized and direct control of the forwarding behavior with the help of central control mechanism. Simulation results show that distributed routing tables can generate efficient SFP and the average cost is acceptable. Compared with other algorithms, our design has a good performance on average cost of paths and load balancing, and the response delay to service requests is much lower.