Network orchestrator for QoS-enabled service function chaining in reliable NFV/SDN infrastructure

The promise of SDN/NFV to offer enhanced functionalities to the service provider networks is now tangible as both technologies have started being steadily investigated and experimentally demonstrated. However, a number of research challenges have not been fully addressed yet. More specifically, a limited interest has been devoted on how to assure reliability and QoS performance while data traverse service chain paths. In this work, we present an SDN orchestrator that periodically evaluate the availability status of the network and, accordingly, adapt service chain paths to recover from congestion events and to preserve QoS performance thus avoiding SLA violations. A prototype is presented along with a performance evaluation of the orchestrator in terms of improved data transfer capabilities against the cost of path adaptations and the controller overhead