A survey on service function chaining

Abstract

Cloud computing is gaining significant attention and virtualized datacenters are becoming popular as a cost-effective infrastructure. The network services are transitioning from a host-centric to a data-centric model moving the data and the computational resources closer to the end users. To meet the dynamic user demands, network operators have chosen to use elastic virtual resources to implement network services over static rigid physical model. With the advent of network function virtualization (NFV), network services instances are provisioned across multiple clouds for performance and load balancing purposes. Interconnection of these instances to form a complete end-to-end network service is complex, time consuming and expensive task. Service function chaining (SFC) is a mechanism that allows various service functions to be connected to each to form a service enabling carriers to benefit from virtualized software defined infrastructure. SFC is an enabler for NFV, providing a flexible and economical alternative to today's static environment for Cloud Service providers (CSPs), Application Service Providers (ASPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs). This paper provides a closer look at the current SFC architecture and a survey of the recent developments in SFC including its relevance with NFV to help determine the future research directions and the standardization efforts of SFC. Finally, the paper discusses open research topics in relevance with the SFC architecture and demonstrates a need for an analytical model for the SFC architecture to achieve the optimal performance.