SFP: Service Function Chain Provision on Programmable Switches for Cloud Tenants

Abstract

Recent progress in programmable switches provides opportunities for service function chains (SFCs) provision to cloud tenants, which has the advantage of flexible deployment and high performance. We devise SFP for such SFC provision in the cloud. SFP's data plane installs physical NFs and is virtualized to host logical SFCs from multiple tenants. SFP's control plane uses a relaxed integer programming model to jointly optimize the placement of physical and logical NFs, which can achieve resource efficiency and high tenant traffic processing throughput within efficient execution time. Our prototype and evaluation shows that SFP can significantly offload NFV computation from server to the switch and maximize the switch resource utilization.