Computer Networks, Vol.187, March 2021, Elsevier
Service Function Chaining (SFC) has gained momentum as one of the building
blocks of the 5G ecosystem. Indeed, SFC combined with other promising
technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) as well as Network
Slicing form the basis for enabling the 5G network services and fulfilling their
requirements. Many contributions have been made to support and enforce SFC,
from chain composition to its deployment and life-cycle management. However,
few research works study SFC orchestration, and even fewer consider the multidomain
context, which remains an open issue with many challenges that need to
be tackled in order to provide end-to-end services. In this paper, we contribute
to filling this gap by introducing a novel architecture for orchestrating and enforcing
multi-domain SFCs. The proposed architecture leverages on the ETSI
MANO standard, as well as SDN and the hierarchical SFC principles, and is agnostic
to the packet forwarding technology used by each administrative domain.
We also implement a Proof of Concept (PoC) that employs different SFC encapsulation
types to evaluate the architecture, where the obtained results prove
our architecture’s efficiency, we’re also able to draw conclusions related to the
encapsulation methods to implement. Finally, we discuss open research issues.
Type:
Journal
Date:
2021-01-04
Department:
Communication systems
Eurecom Ref:
6433
Copyright:
© Elsevier. Personal use of this material is permitted. The definitive version of this paper was published in Computer Networks, Vol.187, March 2021, Elsevier and is available at : https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2021.107806
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