HyperSFP: Fault-Tolerant Service Function Chain Provision on Programmable Switches in Data Centers

Abstract

With the cloud networks being equipped with programmable switch, Service Function Chain (SFC) provision has started to be migrated to the switches for better performance and manageability. In this paper, we design HyperSFP which places multiple SFCs to a data center network (DCN). In the placement algorithm, HyperSFP builds an integer programming (IP) model to achieve functionality, fault tolerance, and load balance. To support large-scale networks, HyperSFP IP model is relaxed to two approximate approaches: Stage-Separated IP model and linear programming (LP) model. Both approaches can improve the algorithm efficiency. HyperSFP’s data plane is designed to deploy the active and backup NFs in the control-plane plan, and migrate traffic from failed active NFs to its backup NFs. Our prototype and evaluation shows that HyperSFP achieves performance gain by implementing NFs on programmable switches, its control plane achieves fault tolerance, load balance, and scalability, and its data plane can handle network failures promptly.