A Holistic Approach to Define Service Chains Using Click-on-OSv on Different NFV Platforms
Alexandre Huff, Giovanni Venâncio, Leonardo da C. Marcuzzo, Vinícius Fülber-Garcia, Carlos R. P. dos Santos, Elias P. Duarte · 2018
The deployment of services in virtualized networks can be done by composing multiple Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs). A Service Function Chain (SFC) consists of a predefined sequence of VNFs which are virtually connected and through which traffic is processed. This work proposes a framework for composing and managing the lifecycle of SFCs formed by VNFs built with Click-on-OSv. The proposal allows the execution of SFCs on different NFV orchestrators. We call the proposed approach "holistic" as it defines a generic API for the composition of SFCs that leverages particular details of different NFV orchestrators. A prototype of the framework was implemented to allow the composition and lifecycle management of SFCs formed by VNFs built with Click-on-OSv on the OpenStack Tacker NFV orchestrator. Results show that the framework is scalable and efficient.