QuLa: Service Selection and Forwarding Table Population in Service-Centric Networking Using Real-Life Topologies

The amount of services located in the network has drastically increased over the last decade which is why more and more datacenters are located at the network edge, closer to the users. In the current Internet it is up to the client to select a destination using a resolution service (Domain Name System, Content Delivery Networks). In the last few years, research on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) suggests to put this selection responsibility at the network components, routers find the closest copy of a content object using the content name as input. We extend the principle of ICN to services, service routers forward requests to service instances located in datacenters spread across the network edge. To solve this problem, we first present a service selection algorithm based on both server and network metrics. Next, we describe a method to reduce the state required in service routers while minimizing the performance loss caused by this data reduction. Simulation results based on real-life networks show that we are able to find a near-optimal load distribution with only minimal state required in the service routers.