An Implementation of Network Service Chaining for SDN-enabled Mobile Packet Data Networks

Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are on the path towards designing flexible architectures. The main goal is to improve the end-to-end system performance responses and at the same time generate more revenue streams thanks to easier and faster service deployments. For this reason, traditional mobile network infrastructure needs to evolve towards a data center oriented infrastructure where services can be initiated on demand. Software Defined Networks (SDN) in combination with Service Function Chaining (SFC) have great potentials for MNOs in terms of flexible and scalable rich service deployment. This paper investigates the setting up an SDN-based SFC experimental implementation that is based on application of SDN concept for mobile core networks. During our experiments, we build a SDN-based Gi-LAN mobile core architecture solution using SFC and evaluate its performance compared to traditional mobile core network service. Our results validate that by dynamically adjusting defined virtual network functions as well as directions and policies of flows with Open Network Operating System (ONOS) controller, SDN-based SFC mechanism is capable of forwarding traffic data flows into each compute nodes having different virtual network functionality.