LISP-Based Integrated Control Plane Framework for Service Function Chaining in Distributed Edge Clouds

Abstract

Service function chaining, which provides a sequential set of multiple services in an end-to-end communication path, is a key technology for providing better service quality to users and efficient management of the network. Recently, as the services traditionally deployed in the data center have become more proximate to the user using a distributed cloud environment, the management of the service chain has become more complex for connecting services between clouds at a distance. In particular, when a user moves and resumes end-to-end communication at a new location, these complexities may lead to an increase in service downtime, which results in network performance degradation. In this paper, we propose an integrated control system to quickly recover the path to the service chain along with mobility management. The proposed system is based on the locator/identifier separation protocol to provide cost-effective mobility management by integrating the location information of users and services into the service chain mapping system. Based on the analysis of the operating cost and handover delay, it was determined that the proposed system can quickly restore a service chain path between distributed clouds with less signaling exchange and minimum delay when compared to previous approaches.

Keywords

• Service function chaining (SFC)
• locator/identifier separation protocol (LISP)
• segment routing IPv6 (SRv6)
• mobility management
• control plane