A Layer 2 Traffic Steering Mechanism for Network Slicing scenarios

The need to support a wide variety of requirements, from the different verticals envisioned, make slicing a core component of the 5G scenario. One of the foundations of slicing is the capability of isolating the different services provided, to guarantee the required performance for each of them. The performance impact of the isolation mechanisms themselves becomes a key aspect that must be carefully balanced and evaluated in all the components of the infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce L2TSM, a Layer 2 Traffic Steering Mechanism for Network Slicing scenarios, including Service Function Chaining and Network Function Virtualization deployments. L2TSM minimizes the overhead, simplifies exposing the programmability of the network devices to be exploited by the service functions and maintains the isolation between the service chains, through a software-defined and standard compliant addressing scheme. With a case study in our L2TSM prototype, we show how different types of traffic composing a service chain are supported and gather some insights on the performance of the solution.