A Novel Compact Header for Traffic Steering in Service Function Chaining

Large-scale networking infrastructures such as service providers deploy complex services to deal with the growing network traffic demand, security concerns, and user preferences. Using Service Function Chaining (SFC)
, a set of networking and management operations, permits to steer the traffic through a list of intermediate services. Traffic steering for SFC is usually based on packet headers to share the SFC information, however such headers introduce encapsulation overhead and require service functions support. In this paper, we present a novel traffic steering technique based on a compact SFC header. The proposed header does not increase the packet size and allows network operators to deploy SFC using legacy service functions. We also present a new SDN architecture for SFC based on compact headers. Our proposal permits a scalable and a flexible SFC deployment in real-life infrastructures.