complex, time-consuming, and error-prone process,
requiring careful planning of topology changes and
network outages and incurring high OPEX. This
situation is exacerbated when a tenant requires
different service sequences for different traffic flows
or when multiple tenants share the same datacenter
network. Through network function virtualization
(NFV) service, SDN can dynamically create a
virtual environment for a specific service chain and
eliminate the complex hardware and labor work.
While possessing great potential, SDN is still in
development stage. The actual mechanisms for
supporting new services are still not defined.
Meanwhile competitive technologies are emerging.
A good example is VXLAN (Mahalingam, 2015),
which is designed with two major objectives: a) to
extend Virtual LAN (VLAN) service from a local
area network to a network that can span an IP
network; b) to address the shortage of VLAN ID. It
advocates the architecture that overlays virtualized
Layer 2 networks over Layer 3 networks. A 24-bit
VXLAN network identifier is added to allow
identifications of more than 16M different VLANs.
While VXLAN can be implemented relatively easily
with existing technologies, it has several major
disadvantages that make it difficult to meet the long
term challenges. First, VXLAN is an extension of
Layer 2 VLAN. Its main objective is to extend
VLAN service rather than to support arbitrary new
services. Therefore, it inherits characteristics of
Layer 2 technologies which make it far away from
application-centric concept. It is hard to generalize
the VLANs supported by VXLAN to other services
such as service chaining. Second, it is hard to
support resource allocation and optimization for
virtual networks due to its distributed nature. Third,
the overhead for overlaying Layer 2 networks over
Layer 3 networks is overwhelming. Fourth, It is hard
to imagine how to support recursive services
(discussed more in the next section) with VXLAN.
OpenADN (Paul et al., 2013) is another option
that has been proposed recently. With OpenADN,
two new labels are added, one at Layer 3.5 and
another at Layer 4.5. The label at Layer 3.5 is used
to forward packets and the label at Layer 4.5 is used
to interconnect two Layer 3.5 labels after passing a
middle-box. Although OpenADN can solve some of
the issues with VXLAN, it is still too complex to
implement. Furthermore, issues such as recursive
services still cannot be supported.
In this paper, we will propose a new Service
Forwarding Label (SFL) mechanism at Layer 5 that
can be used to identify a service instance for packet
forwarding so that NFV and application-centric
traffic steering can be realized with very little
overhead. Our label creation process is application
driven allowing close integration of applications and
forwarding functions. Combining with the power of
SDN controller, SFL can support resource allocation
and optimization on a per service instance basis.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
we will use NFV as a new service example to
discuss more detail about the issues to be resolved.
In Section 3, we will propose our SFL scheme. This
will be followed by several use case scenarios in
Section 4. We will finish the paper with some
concluding remarks in Section 5.
2 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEW
SERVICES
In this section, we will discuss in detail the
characteristics and challenges of new services under
SDN context. We will use NFV as a key example for
the new services SDN will provide. In specific, we
will investigate the issues related to recursive
network virtualization, which illustrates the
characteristics of recursive services in more general
cases. The reason we choose NFV as an example is
because it can represent a significant portion of new
services currently being envisioned by network
providers and service providers.
The initial SDN adopters, both vendors and
network providers, have focused on some
fundamental issues related to separating control and
data planes. The benefits of creating new services
have not been fully explored. A good example is the
Google SDN WAN project mentioned earlier (Jain
et al., 2013). Before the SDN project, the WAN
Google had been using for interconnecting their
datacenters had been managed using traditional
approach which was slow due to manual
provisioning process. On average, the utilization of
Google’s WAN at that time was 20 to 30%. Through
multiple years of efforts, Google has upgraded its
WAN with SDN technology. The initial results are
very encouraging. Utilization has been increased to
around 70 to 90%. In some cases, 100% utilization
has been achieved. The key enablers of this
improvement are the SDN dynamic flow creation
capability and a more sophisticated optimization
approach based on Max-min fairness. SDN allows
Google to do centralized traffic engineering that can
balance load distribution across their entire WAN
with sophisticated optimization algorithms. Large
amount of elastic traffic also helps increase the
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