A new method for providing network services: Service function chain

Service deployment and management have been a challenge for the network operators because of the characteristics of traditional methods for service configuration and service deployment: unchangeable configuration and ossified deployment. Based on the ideas of Service Function Chain (SFC), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Network (SDN), and Path Computation Element (PCE), we introduce a method that can not only maintain the services in a flexible and scalable way, but also place services in a topology-independent way and steer traffic among different services. We abstract the service path selection problem as a grey system theory problem and propose an algorithm to give a proper service composition selection and traffic steering method. We also validate the usability of the proposed solution in prototype and efficiency of the proposed algorithm in simulation environment.