Policy-driven vCPE through dynamic network service function chaining

Abstract

Virtual CPEs address the low agility, slow time-to-market and high costs (of development, deployment and support) that are inheritable to traditional CPEs. They take advantage of the economics of Cloud Computing and the ability to run Virtual Network Functions in a general computing platform to build richer services, with faster development and deployment times, all whilst reducing costs. When coupled together with Service Function Chaining and the ability to build/enter chains dynamically, an opportunity arises to enhance this system by making the whole vCPE's functionality policy-driven. We will start by constructing the vCPE within an OpenSource cloud platform (OpenStack), which will have dynamic SFC capablities added through own extensions. Then we will make the traffic classification through a DPI (ntop's nDPI), which will mark flows according to a configurable policy (REST interface) that will determine which service chain that flow must follow. Some virtual functions within a chain may trigger events (such as reaching the traffic quota for a certain service), being the policy immediately enforced at the VNFs and an on-the-fly policy change possible through the REST interface (for instance, change the throttle amount to a given application traffic). A live Proof-of-Concept was made which allowed real devices to connect to the vCPE