Service failure diagnosis in service function chain

Abstract

Network function virtualization (NFV) is a powerful emerging technique with widespread applicability. It provides Network Functions (NFs) through software virtualization techniques that decouple software and hardware. Some connected network functions constitute a service function chain (SFC). Therefore, the deployment of SFCs is much agile and simple. However, this leads to more service failure. The service failure includes service availability failure and service quality degradation. Aiming at the problem that the existing service function chain detection methods have high detection cost and cannot locate the failure accurately. This paper presents a method based on minimum detection cost. The method consists of failure detection and failure localization. In failure detection, we calculate detection paths according to the topology of network functions to avoid duplicate probing of links between network functions. In failure localization, we locate service availability failure and service quality degradation respectively and add timestamp fields to network service header to analyze locations of service quality degradation. Experiments show that the method reduces active detection cost and improves the recall and false-positive of service failure localization.