ONF Connect 2019

Service Function Chaining (SFC) which dynamically steers traffic through an ordered list of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) is important for Telco to provide complex residential services at the network edge. However, SFC when implemented on CORD platform, suffers a serious performance issue of the overwhelmed switching entries it adds to CORD's Open vSwitch (OVS). In order to solve the SFC performance weakness of the OVS, we propose a new hybrid switch OVSPP (OVS+SPP) which leverages our self developed dpdk-enabled vSwitch, Soft Patch Panel (SPP) for handling the simple switching among VNFs while leaving the other switching tasks of the CORD platform for OVS. This new proposed hybrid switch minimizes the number of switching entries added to OVS by SFC at the price of small overhead in SPP operation. This work presents the integration of OVSPP to CIAB CORD platform with 2 VNFs (Firewall and IDS) and the results of their performance comparison.