A universal protocol mechanism for network function virtualization and application-centric traffic steering

New services such as network virtualization, service chaining, and application-centric traffic steering bring new opportunities for network providers and service providers. While Software Defined Network is poised to support new services, it is still in development stage. Mechanisms supporting new services are still missing. In this paper, we propose a new application driven mechanism called Service Forwarding Label that can be used as a universal group-based label to differentiate various services and forward packets based on different service requirements. Compared with existing solutions such as VXLAN, our SFL approach provides universal support for a variety of existing and new services with much less overhead.