Service Function Chaining on Programmable Data Plane

Service Function Chaining (SFC) enables advanced in-network packet processing by passing through an ordered set of service functions. However, it is challenging to achieve high performance because chaining functions like service function forwarders generally run on commodity servers, which offer limited throughput and require additional round-trip times. In this paper, we present P4-SFC, a novel SFC architecture that leverages the flexibility of emerging programmable switches for high performance SFC packet processing. P4-SFC achieves low latency and high throughput by migrating the chaining functions to programmable switches. Our benchmark results show that P4-SFC outperforms existing the server-based solution in chain latency.