FlowFall: A Service Chaining Architecture with Commodity Technologies

Service chaining is an emerging architecture from the trend of Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization. This architecture is expected to improve network flexibility and reduce equipment and operational costs. However, recent approaches for service chaining require new networking technologies that need to be standardized, implemented and developed. In this paper, we present and demonstrate a scalable and deployable service chaining architecture, called FlowFall. FlowFall does not require any novel technologies, only requires OpenFlow and current Virtual Machines as Virtual Network Function. Moreover, we focus on the NFV backbone network and how to achieve scale-out its performance. We describe the approach of FlowFall and an evaluation in which our method achieves 10-gigabit wire-rate throughput with 128-byte packets on a single Hyper Visor and scale-out performance among multiple Hyper Visors. Finally, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept of FlowFall in an actual service network at Interop Tokyo 2015 ShowNet.