Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provides the capability to steer traffic in a network to lower the management cost. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) gives the chance to implement network functions at the right time and the right place to increase operation flexibility. Together SDN and NFV show the potential to create an agile system with a low operations cost and a high customer satisfaction. However, the combination of SDN with NFV results in the redundant packet forwarding traffic inside SDN in order to forward packets based on the deployed network functions for a service chain. Besides, it also increase the computation requirement of a controller for possible packet header modifications and flow states management. In this paper, we propose to implement network functions on SDN switches to lower the traffic inside of SDN and the computation requirement of a SDN controller. We create network function modules for open virtual switches and make those functions to be managed by a controller with an algorithm to streamline the implemented service chains. Our results show that the proposed system can reduce about 2/3 of current network traffic compared to the current solutions without the modification of forwarding tables and packets.
['Cheng-Liang Hsieh', 'Ning Weng']
Virtual Network Functions Instantiation on SDN Switches for Policy-Aware Traffic Steering