Consolidating Policy Chains Using One Pass Packet Steering in Software Defined Data Centers

In this paper, we address the problem of service function chaining in a network and present a solution that tackles this problem in Software Defined Data Centers. Service function chaining can broadly be categorized into middlebox placement in a network and packet steering through middleboxes. We address packet steering in this paper. In particular, we present a One Pass Packet Steering (OPPS) approach for use in multi-subscriber environments. We show algorithms and proof of concept implementation using emulation. We examine how OPPS can benefit from Software Defined Data Center architecture to overcome challenges that occur in simple linear networks. Our results show how OPPS can utilize a lesser number of middleboxes and achieve the same hop counts as a reference model which has been described in previous work as ideal, without violating the subscriber's policy chain.