Network Topology-aware Service Function Chaining in Software Defined Network

In this paper., we study a way to reduce data overhead made by packet encapsulation in Service Function Chaining (SFC). SFC uses packet encapsulation for creation of network transport topology overlay to alter packet forwarding process through Service Function (SF) path. We propose two SFC encapsulation application approaches as alternatives to approach defined in SFC architecture. To examine our proposal., we used a reference SDN network in Mininet. The result of this study is a comparison between approaches of SFC encapsulation application which shows that our proposed approaches allow to reduce overall overhead. Overhead for a single packet can be reduced by one third or by half of the original amount depending on which approach has been used.