Service forwarding label for network function virtualization and application-centric traffic steering

New services such as network virtualization, service chaining, and application-centric traffic steering bring new opportunities for network providers and service providers. Existing Internet architecture is suffering from the so-called ossification problem, which makes it difficult to support new applications. Software Defined Network (SDN) is becoming a new paradigm for both WAN and enterprise networks. By separating control and data planes, SDN allows network providers to sell new services without changing their physical switches. While SDN is poised to support new services, it is still in development stage. Mechanisms supporting new services are still missing. In this paper, we propose a new application driven mechanism called Service Forwarding Label (SFL) which can be used as a uniform label to differentiate various services and forward packets based on different service requirements. Compared with existing solutions such as VXLAN, our SFL approach introduces less overhead and supports more new services.