Implementing NFV System with OpenStack

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a promising approach for service providers to reduce CAPEX and OPEX and has drawn a lot of attention from vendors. Service Function Chaining (SFC) provides the ability to define a sequence of network services. This paper identifies two important issues (placement and scaling) on deploying reliably and efficiently SFC with a cloud platform. Based on the OpenStack Tacker architecture, we explore possible solutions and implement the missing features in Tacker for SFC. We propose two algorithms for finding service location and policy of scaling. The experiments show the efficiency of our approach compared with the default deployment methods provided in OpenStack. We also discuss and highlight future work to improve utilization of cloud platform for deploying service function chaining.