Cloud-native Service Function Chaining for 5G based on Network Service Mesh

Abstract

5G will provide a flexible and programmable infrastructure, allowing different networks to share the same access network. A way to respond to the diverse service requirements of 5G while reducing both CAPEX and OPEX is to adopt cloud-native architectures. In this context, micro-services software design, the corner stone of cloud-native architecture, seems to be ideal for 5G. However, despite its several advantages, micro-services raise new challenges which slow its adoption down in the NFV ecosystem. Indeed, steering the expected 5G traffic between cloud-native network function is extremely challenging and is still under-investigated. In this paper, we address the service function chaining (SFC) in micro-service based network function virtualization (NFV) ecosystem from the view of the traffic steering. Specifically, we design and implement a cloud-native SFC framework offering efficient traffic steering mechanisms while considering the network state of the underlying NFV infrastructure. In this context, an optimized network-aware load balancing strategy is proposed. Based on extensive experiments, the results obtained show that our strategy achieved good results in terms of i) end-to-end latency and ii) deployment time.