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Amalgam: Distributed Network Control With Scalable Service Chaining

Management of virtual network function (VNF) service chaining for a large scale network spanning across multiple administrative domains is difficult due to the decentralized nature of the underlying system. Existing session-based and software-defined networking (SDN) oriented approaches to manage service function chains (SFCs) fall short to cater to the plug-and-play nature of the constituent devices of a large scale eco-system such as the Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we propose Amalgam, a composition of a distributed SDN control plane along with a distributed SFC manager, that is capable of managing SFCs dynamically by exploiting the innetwork processing platform composed of plug-and-play devices. To ensure the distributed placement of VNFs in the in-network processing platform, we propose a greedy heuristic. Further, to test the performance, we develop a complete container driven emulation framework MiniDockNet on top of standard Mininet APIs. Our experiments on a large scale realistic topology reveal that Amalgam significantly reduces flow-setup time and exhibits better performance in terms of end-to-end delay for short flows.