Distributed Function Chaining with Anycast Routing

TL;DR

This paper proposes a decentralized approach to service chaining in networks by augmenting routing with service awareness, eliminating the need for a centralized orchestrator, and demonstrating its effectiveness through implementation and evaluation.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel network-layer routing augmentation for service chaining that removes reliance on centralized orchestration, enabling flexible, resilient, and scalable service delivery.

Findings

Easily steer traffic through available resources

Supports incremental deployment and multi-domain chaining

Offers failure resiliency and easy maintenance

Abstract

Current networks more and more rely on virtualized middleboxes to flexibly provide security, protocol optimization, and policy compliance functionalities. As such, delivering these services requires that the traffic be steered through the desired sequence of virtual appliances. Current solutions introduce a new logically centralized entity, often called orchestrator, needing to build its own holistic view of the whole network so to decide where to direct the traffic. We advocate that such a centralized orchestration is not necessary and that, on the contrary, the same objectives can be achieved by augmenting the network layer routing so to include the notion of service and its chaining. In this paper, we support our claim by designing such a system. We also present an implementation and an early evaluation, showing that we can easily steer traffic through available resources. This approach also offers promising features such as incremental deployability, multi-domain service chaining, failure resiliency, and easy maintenance.