Abstract
Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an emerging paradigm aiming to provide flexible service deployment, lifecycle management, and scaling in a micro-service architecture. SFC is defined as a logically connected list of ordered Service Functions (SFs) that require high availability to maintain user experience. The SFC protection mechanism is one way to ensure high availability, and it is achieved by proactively deploying backup SFs and installing backup paths in the network. Recent studies focused on ensuring the availability of backup SFs, but overlooked SFC unavailability due to network failures. This paper extends our previous work to propose a Hybrid Protection mechanism for SFC (HP-SFC) that divides SFC into segments and combines the merits of local and global failure recovery approaches to define an installation policy for backup paths. A novel labeling technique labels SFs instead of SFC, and they are stacked as per the order of SFs in a particular SFC before being inserted into a packet header for traffic steering through segment routing. The emulation results showed that HP-SFC recovered SFC from failure within 20–25 ms depending on the topology and reduced backup paths’ flow entries by at least 8.9% and 64.5% at most. Moreover, the results confirmed that the segmentation approach made HP-SFC less susceptible to changes in network topology than other protection schemes.
Highlights
Network softwarization technologies such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have enabled the provisioning of dynamic end-to-end services in 5G, Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and other emerging trends
A novel HP-Service Function Chaining (SFC) protection mechanism was proposed in this manuscript, which focused on efficient network traffic rerouting in SFC when a failure occurred
Hybrid Protection mechanism for SFC (HP-SFC) was designed based on the segment routing technique, where Service Functions (SFs) chains were divided into segments and backup paths established for each segment using the backup SFs
Summary
Network softwarization technologies such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) have enabled the provisioning of dynamic end-to-end services in 5G, Internet of Things, Industry 4.0, and other emerging trends. Proactive installation of backup paths and a traffic rerouting mechanism for SFC protection seems trivial, but can result in high recovery delay and an increased number of control messages and flow entries, if not designed diligently. Approaches such as global and local protection from conventional networks either cause significant resource underutilization or a critical increase in end-to-end transmission delays. The use of many flow entries by the SFC protection mechanism results in increased control messages between the SDN controller and switches and flow table overflows in software-defined switches It must use the minimum number of flow entries for rerouting the traffic to and from the backup SF to reduce the flow table occupancy problem. The concluding discussion on the merits and limitations of HP-SFC is presented in Section 5 along with future directions for improvement
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