Exploiting ICN for flexible management of software-defined networks

Abstract

Networks are becoming increasingly complex and service providers incorporate additional functionality in the network to protect, manage and improve service performance. Soft- ware Defined Networking (SDN) seeks to manage the net- work with the help of a (logically) centralized control plane. We observe that current SDN solutions pre-translate policy (what) into forwarding rules at specific switches (where). We argue that this choice limits the dynamicity, flexibility and reliability that a software based network could provide. Information Centric Networking (ICN) shifts the focus of networks away from being predominantly location oriented communication environments. We believe ICN can signifi- cantly improve the flexibility for network management. In this paper, we focus on one of the problems of network man- agement – service chaining – the steering of flows through the different network functions needed, before it is delivered to the destination. We propose Function-Centric Service Chaining (FCSC), a solution that exploits ICN to provide flexibility in managing networks that utilize virtualization to dynamically place functions in the network as required. We use a real-world topology to compare the performance of FCSC and a more “traditional” SDN solution. We show that FCSC reacts to failures with fewer packet drops, adapts to new middleboxes more quickly, and maintains less state in the network.