HybridSFC: Accelerating Service Function Chains with Parallelism

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) coupled with Software Defined Networking (SDN) creates new opportunities as well as substantial challenges such as increased Service Function Chain (SFC) latency and reduced throughput. In this paper, we present HybridSFC, a framework that explores the opportunities of parallel packet processing at both traffic level and Network Function (NF) level. It incorporates innovative control and data-plane mechanisms that partition and convert a sequential chain into several (finer-grained) SFClets that can be executed in parallel on multiple cores and servers. HybridSFC is practical in that it can handle NFs spanning multiple servers and requires no modifications to existing NFs. Experiments show that HybridSFC reduces latency up to 51% with 7% CPU overhead, and a 1.42×-1.87× improvement in overall system throughput.