Subject: [Coin] Agenda item proposal: Using Service Function Chaining for In-Network Computation

From: Adrien WION <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2019 15:22:34 +0200

Hi Marie-Jose,

Please, find below our item proposition for the IETF 105 agenda.

Title: Using Service Function Chaining for In-Network Computation

Abstract:

Canonically, network devices have been designed as intermediary nodes
whose single function was to route and forward packets to their
destination, letting complex operations to edge, usually at end-hosts.
Recently, some proposals have been made to modify routers and switches
behavior: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has provided flexibility on
their control plane; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) allows
elastic adaption to the work load. Recent advent of flexible networking
hardware enables programing complex functions in the data plane. These
building blocks enable us to rethink completely the functions a network
device can and/or should run.

Following this line of thought, we propose to enhance classical IP
routers to offload them part of the service chaining computation.

In particular, our proposal is to augment the routing layer by
introducing the notion of service. Our solution leverages on existing
distributed routing protocols where, in addition, autonomous nodes
announce information about the virtual services they provide. Our design
is modular, incrementally deployable and has been implemented in what we
call a NFV-Router. These NFV-Routers can host services (running on a
virtual machine or offloaded to the data plane) and announce them on the
network using any Interior Gateway Protocol. This augmented network view
allows NFV-Routers to steer flows through a set of services to propose
complex functions in the network. 

Reference:

  Adrien Wion, Mathieu Bouet, Luigi Iannone, Vania Conan, Distributed
Function Chaining with Anycast Routing:
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02163976v1

Regards,

Adrien Wion

PhD Student
Thales / Telecom ParisTech