OpenSCaaS: an open service chain as a service platform toward the integration of SDN and NFV

Service providers today rely on service-chaining policy enforced by omnipresent middleboxes (MBoxes) to achieve crucial performance and security guarantees in their networks. On the other hand, they are currently struggling to satisfy growing traffic demands on their traditional services. Given the promise of emerging technologies, such as SDN and NFV, we argue that the enforcement of service-chaining policy can greatly benefit from the integration of them. However, it is challenging to synthesize these two technologies due to the need to meet the requirements of flexibility, scalability, and auto-provisioning without modifying SDN standards (e.g. OpenFlow) and MBoxes. In this article we present the design of OpenSCaaS, an open platform for service chain as a service, by using the tangible capabilities of SDN together with NFV. OpenSCaaS allows service-providers to design a general architecture based on SDN to achieve flexibility, encapsulate Service Chain Identifier (SC-ID) based on Source MAC to guarantee scalability, and realize auto-provisioning based on NFV to offer adaptability. In doing so, we take a significant step to address industry and academic concerns about the integration of SDN and NFV.