A Novel SDN-based Architecture and Traffic Steering Method for Service Function Chaining

Complex services composed of middleboxes are mainly used to meet the requirements of advanced services such as security services, monitoring systems, and personalized enterprise services. However, forwarding a traffic across middleboxes is a tedious and error-prone task. Service function chaining (SFC) presents different solutions to steer the traffic among intermediate service functions. However statically managing, deploying, and configuring an SFC remains a challenging task. Dynamic SFC has recently gained significant interest from big networking operators motivated by the emerging technologies of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In this paper, we present a new SDN based architecture and a novel header for traffic steering for dynamic SFC. Our results show that the header we describe in this paper does not increase the packet size nor the overhead.