An Architecture for Service Function Chaining in Multiple Data Centers using Tableless Source Routing
Nome: RODOLFO VIEIRA VALENTIM
Tipo: Dissertação de mestrado acadêmico
Data de publicação: 30/07/2020
Orientador:
| Nome | Papel |
|---|---|
| RODOLFO DA SILVA VILLACA | Orientador |
Banca:
| Nome | Papel |
|---|---|
| RAFAEL PASQUINI | Examinador Externo |
| MAGNOS MARTINELLO | Examinador Interno |
| RODOLFO DA SILVA VILLACA | Orientador |
Resumo: "Telecommunication Service Providers (TSP) need to offer a wide range of services to their customers. The network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN) make it easy to implement these services by virtualizing and chaining service functions. However, there are cases when these functions are in geographically distant data centers (or clouds) in different domains. Telecommunication networks are almost ubiquitous, but access to these networks is provided by multiple different TSPs and each TSP has a footprint focused on a specific region. This market fragmentation makes it challenging to deploy cost-effective SFC spanning multiple countries. Also, combined with geo-distributed telecommunication data centers, service providers could place virtual network functions closer to customers, reducing latency, and improving reliability. On the other hand, few works in the literature focus on the mechanisms for the implementation of multiple cloud network function chaining.
In this context, this work presents a solution for implementing Service Function Chaining (SFC) in multiple clouds. We highlight the use of tableless source routing in the data center networks, which has several advantages in managing flows and maintaining states on network devices. We propose an architecture compatible with ETSI NFV to the Control Plane and tableless source routing for the Data Plane, which will require modifications of the mechanisms in the transport layer. The hypothesis is that by using a transport-aware SFC and changing the forwarding mechanism to use tableless strict source routing, we can enable a more efficient and flexible SFC mechanism that decreases the complexity in connecting multiple clouds. Also, this shift of paradigm allows fine-grained traffic engineering, which improves scalability in the network core and optimizes access to other TSP data center infrastructures.
We implemented, as a proof-of-concept, prototypes of the proposed solution with current cloud technologies, such as OpenFlow, OpenStack, and Open vSwitch. The results of functional and performance tests showed that the proposed solution enables SFC between geo-distributed infrastructure domains with low-cost and in a efficient and flexible way. Moreover, our proposal provides mechanisms to the NFV orchestrator that allows fine-grained traffic engineering decisions to optimize the selection of network paths and connections between domains. This dissertation also paves the way for exploring other source routing methods by comparing performance metrics in different SFC scenarios, proving viability for such implementation in production environments."
