EasyOrchestrator: An End-user Oriented Network Service Creation Platform with Verification Mechanism

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has emerged as an innovative and promising network architecture which can migrate Network Functions (NFs) from costly physical equipment to dynamically allocated virtualized instances. Using these Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), many end-users can chain VNFs together to create network services which are commonly referred to as Service Function Chains (SFCs). An SFC involves multiple VNFs and describes how they interact, as incorrect dependencies between any of these VNFs may cause packets forwarding errors. However, few orchestration tools are equipped with a verification mechanism to check SFC before deployment. In addition, most existing NFV orchestration tools are over complicated, making it difficult for end-users to learn and use. In this paper, we introduce a model called SFC-Verifier (SFC-V) which targets on automatically detecting the constraints between VNFs, helping end-users compose and verify SFCs in service design phase. Built on SFC-V, we present EasyOrchestrator which facilitates end-users to create and deploy network service. Users can develop customizable network services via a UI-friendly environment on a web browser. The evaluation results demonstrate that the SFC verification time and response time of EasyOrchestrator are much smaller than the benchmarks. Besides, it effectively reduces the end-users' service development time and improves service development accuracy.