Performance of Service Function Chaining on the OpenStack Cloud Platform

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is considered as one of the most promising solutions to deploy future end-to-end network services, taking advantage of emerging network technologies such as Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization that foster advanced communication infrastructure programmability. In this paper, we present an experimental study about the OpenStack SFC extension, which enables the well-known cloud platform as an open-source software solution for implementing SFC. We verify the correctness of the traffic steering operations put in place by the SFC extension and measure the performance in terms of network throughput and response time of the related REST API, considering an increasing length of the service chain. Reported results demonstrate that deploying a service chain takes a reasonable amount of time of a few seconds, whereas the throughput performance at the data plane can be heavily affected by packet processing overhead.