Control Plane Design for Failure Protection in Software Defined Service Function Chains

摘要

Service Function Chaining (SFC) provides tailored service to user by orderly connecting several serviceetwork functions. SFCs are susceptible to failures in network data plane, which effects service availability and user Service Level Agreement (SLA). Efficient traffic rerouting mechanisms are required in terms of cost and delay to ensure service availability and user SLA. This paper presents a novel control plane design in software defined SFCs for establishing a detouring path to handle link failures. The proposed design uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) controller to detect the failures and segment routing approach to craft a flexible yet effective detouring path. Performance evaluation of the proposed detouring method is done through emulation in the Mininet, and results confirm its improved performance against the general network detouring methods.