Service Function Chaining in 5G & Beyond Networks: Challenges and Open Research Issues

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of Service Function Chaining in 5G networks, highlighting challenges and open research issues to improve flexible, reliable, and dynamic network services.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of SFC challenges and open issues, guiding future research in dynamic and reliable service chaining in 5G and beyond.

Findings

Identifies key challenges in SFC deployment and management

Highlights open research issues for reliable SFC operations

Discusses the role of SDN and NFV in SFC evolution

Abstract

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a trending paradigm, which has helped to introduce unseen flexibility in telecom networks. Network service providers, as well as big network infrastructure providers, are competing to offer personalized services for their customers. Hence, added value services require the invocation of various elementary functions called Service Functions (SFs). The SFC concept composes and imposes the order in which SFs are invoked for a particular service. Emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization support the dynamic creation and management of SFC. Even though SFC is an active technical area where several aspects were already standardized and many SFC architecture flavors are currently deployed, yet some challenges and open issues are still to be solved. In this paper, we present different research problems related to SFC and investigate several key challenges that should be addressed to realize more reliable SFC operations.