On cross-domain Service Function Chain orchestration: An architectural framework

Abstract Service Function Chaining (SFC) has gained momentum as one of the building blocks of the 5G ecosystem. Indeed, SFC combined with other promising technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) as well as Network Slicing form the basis for enabling the 5G network services and fulfilling their requirements. Many contributions have been made to support and enforce SFC, from chain composition to its deployment and life-cycle management. However, few research works study SFC orchestration, and even fewer consider the multi-domain context, which remains an open issue with many challenges that need to be tackled in order to provide end-to-end services. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by introducing a novel architecture for orchestrating and enforcing multi-domain SFCs. The proposed architecture leverages on the ETSI MANO standard, as well as SDN and the hierarchical SFC principles, and is agnostic to the packet forwarding technology used by each administrative domain. We also implement a Proof of Concept (PoC) that employs different SFC encapsulation types to evaluate the architecture, where the obtained results prove our architecture’s efficiency, we are also able to draw conclusions related to the encapsulation methods to implement. Finally, we discuss open research issues.