Orchestrating scalable service function chains in a NFV environment

Service Function Chaining (SFC) serves the traffic of a specific service along an ordered set of Service Functions (SFs). SFC uses Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technologies to reach the deployment and removal of SFC in an appropriate time with minimal costs. However, during the life time of deployed SFCs, the SFs are exposed to the risk of overloading, which results in an end-to-end packets drop and high delay at the application level. This paper presents the concept of a Scalable SFC Orchestrator capable of deploying SF Chains following the ETSI NFV architectural model, as well as orchestrating the runtime phase by rerouting the traffic to a different path in case of overload of certain SF instances. Moreover, a selection algorithm is presented to build the updated paths after scaling. The Scalable Orchestration feature is implemented and added as a main feature to an SFC Orchestrator. Furthermore, it is integrated into a current NFV architecture and evaluated in an NFV environment making use of the Fraunhofer FOKUS Open Baton toolkit in an OpenStack and Open Daylight based environment.