Pre-provisioning Protection for Faster Failure Recovery in Service Function Chaining

Service function chaining (SFC) enables the traffic to be sequentially processed by the service functions (SFs) based on its service requirement. Any failure on the service function path (SFP) of the SFC needs to be rapidly recovered for continued end-to-end service delivery. A local detouring approach could achieve rapid recovery. However, providing local protection to each component on an SFP could consume memory of the switch to store alternate path flow rules. In addition, the efforts required for per-flow detouring in local detouring could overburden the software-defined networking controller (SDNC). In order to reduce the complexity associated with the recovery process, we propose the segment-based SFP protection (SSP) approach. Our proposed SSP approach divides the SFP into a set of service segments (SSes). Our proposed SSP approach employs the flow-grouping strategy to group the flows that share the common SS to enable local detouring via a single point of change in action and thus minimizes the effort required for per-flow detouring. Additionally, the SSP approach conserves the switch memory consumption for configuring SFP and its protection.