Monte: SFCs Migration Scheme in the Distributed Programmable Data Plane

Service function chains (SFCs) are sequences of network functions that provide specific services to meet operators’ needs in today's ISPs and datacenter networks. To improve the performance of SFCs, programmable data planes are used to leverage their low latency and high performance packet processing. However, SFCs need to be adaptable to dynamics such as changes in requirements and attributes. Therefore, the ability to migrate SFCs is essential. Unfortunately, migrating SFCs in distributed programmable data planes is challenging due to the risk of degraded performance and failure to meet SFCs requirements and resource constraints in switches. In this paper, we propose Monte, which provides an effective SFCs migration scheme in distributed programmable data planes. We build a novel integer programming model to represent the migration process with constraints on resource limitations of switches and SFCs attributes in the distributed data plane. Additionally, an SFCs migration algorithm is designed to optimize the migration cost by deeply analyzing resource allocation in the switch pipeline. Monte has been implemented on both P4 software switches (Bmv2) and hardware switches (Intel Tofino ASIC). Extensive evaluation results show that the migration cost in Monte is 94.03% lower on average than the state-of-the-art deployment scheme, and Monte can effectively save pipeline resources.