Enabling automatic composition and verification of service function chain

Abstract

NFV together with SDN promises to provide more flexible and efficient service provision methods by decoupling the network functions (NFs) from the physical network topology and devices, but requires the real-time and automatic composition and verification for service function chain (SFC). However, most of SFCs today are still typically built through manual configuration processes, which are slow and error prone. In this paper, we present a novel SFC composition framework, called Automatic Composition Toolkit (ACT). It aims to automatically detect the dependencies and conflicts between NFs, so as to compose and verify SFCs before they are enforced on the physical infrastructure.