Network operators are faced with the challenge of deploying and managing middleboxes (also called inline services) such as firewalls within their broadband access, datacenter or enterprise networks. Due to the lack of available protocols to route traffic through middleboxes, operators still rely on error-prone and complex low-level configurations to coerce traffic through the desired set of middleboxes. Built upon the recent software-defined networking (SDN) architecture and OpenFlow protocol, this paper proposes StEERING, short for SDN inlinE sERvices and forwardlNG. It is a scalable framework for dynamically routing traffic through any sequence of middleboxes. With simple centralized configuration, StEERING can explicitly steer different types of flows through the desired set of middleboxes, scaling at the level of per-subscriber and per-application policies. With its capability to support flexible routing, we further propose an algorithm to select the best locations for placing services, such that the performance is optimized. Overall, StEERING allows network operators to monetize their middlebox deployment in new ways by allowing subscribers flexibly to select available network services.
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