Neo-NSH: Towards scalable and efficient dynamic service function chaining of elastic network functions

Middleboxes (Service Functions) have become indispensable part of Enterprise, Mobile and Data Center networks. Network operators rely on middleboxes to enforce network policies and to provide performance optimization, security and other value added services. With the increasing scale of network services and use cases demanding a specific sequence of service functions, the complexity and scale requirements of enforcing the network policies and orchestrating the service functions have significantly increased. Hence, elastic scaling and dynamic service chaining of network functions is fundamental for the performance of Data Center and Enterprise networks. To this end, we propose Neo-NSH: an amendment to Network Service Headers (NSH) proposal. We re-purpose the 24 bit Service Path Identifier (SPI) to express the service-chain ID instead of representing the service paths. Our proposal extends on the key benefits of NSH and makes it more efficient and scalable in facilitating the dynamic service function chaining.