NF-switch: VNFs-enabled SDN switches for high performance service function chaining

Current Software-Defined Networking (SDN) switch examines many packet headers to support the flow-based packet forwarding. To support the application-based forwarding for a service function chaining (SFC), SDN switch requires packet header modifications to identify the processing status and multiple packet matchings to steer the network traffics to different VMs in a specific order. Both challenges require significant computation resources in a system and result in severe system performance degradation. To improve the system performance and keep the flexibility, this paper proposes NF-Switch to eliminate the requirement of packet modifications and to reduce the number of matchings for the application-based forwarding. Compared to the native implementation, our experimental results show that NF-Switch reduces the system processing latency to one quarter and increases the system throughput about 3 times for a SFC with 10 network functions (NFs). Moreover, the proposed solution maintains the content switching time to update the implemented SFC for a better system scalability regarding to the number of NFs in a SFC.