One Pass Packet Steering (OPPS) for stateless policy chains in multi-subscriber SDN

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of service function chaining in a network. Currently, problems of chaining services in a network (i.e., service function chaining) can be broadly categorised into middlebox placement in a network and packet steering through middleboxes. In this work, we propose a One Pass Packet Steering (OPPS) approach for use in multi-subscriber environments, with the aim of reducing end-to-end delay between Users and Services. We show a proof of concept implementation using emulations performed with Mininet. Our results show that, given a fixed topology and different sets of policy chains containing the same middleboxes, the end to end delay of subscribers using these policy chains remains approximately the same. Also, using our emulation environment, we show how the OPPS processing time is impacted by the number of service functions.