Topic: Scalable Network Function Deployment and Service Function Chaining

Speaker: Prof. kate Ching-Ju Lin 林靖茹教授

Date: 2018/04/27

Time: 14:20

Location: Delta building R216, NTHU

Abstract: 

The emergence of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables flexible and agile service function chaining in a Software Defined Network (SDN). While this virtualization technology efficiently offers customization capability, it however comes with a cost of consuming precious TCAM resources. Due to this, the number of service chains that an SDN can support is limited by the flowtable size of a switch. To break this limitation, this work presents CRT-Chain, a service chain forwarding protocol that requires only constant flowtable entries, regardless of the number of service chain requests. The core of CRT-Chain is an encoding mechanism that leverages Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to compress the forwarding information into small labels. A switch does not need to insert forwarding rules for every service chain request, but only needs to conduct very simple modular arithmetic to extract the forwarding rules directly from CRT- Chain’s labels attached in the header. We further incorporate prime reuse and path segmentation in CRT-Chain to reduce the header size and, hence, save bandwidth consumption. Our evaluation results show that, when a chain consists of no more than five functions, CRT-Chain actually generates a header smaller than the legacy 32-bit header defined in IETF. By enabling prime reuse and segmentation, CRT-Chain further reduces the total signaling overhead to a level lower than the conventional scheme, showing that CRT-Chain not only enables scalable flowtable-free chaining but also improves network efficiency.

Bio:

Kate Ching-Ju Lin an Associate Professor in Department of Computer Science at National Chiao Tung University, HsinChu, Taiwan. Her current research interests include wireless systems, software-defined networking, visible light communications, and internet of things. Dr. Lin is an editor for ACM/Springer Wireless Networks. She has also served as PC members in many international conferences, including ACM MOBICOM, USENIX NSDI, IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICNP, etc. She is a recipient of the Intel Distinguished Collaborative Research Award. Dr. Lin is an ACM member and IEEE senior member.