Service function chaining with segment routing

This Master Thesis covers multiple aspects for implementing Service Function Chaining (SFC) with Segment Routing (SR). As a great majority of networks perform a hop-by-hop routing based on a routing protocol without any path-control, Segment Routing has been introduced to address this problem. It to allows network devices to steer a packet through a controlled set of instructions. A Segment Routing Header based service function chaining architecture develops the ability of creating a chain of connected network services but it requires an SR-domain where every service is able to deal with the Segment Routing Header, plus some ingress and egress nodes which are respectively responsible for encapsulating/decapsulating the traffic. SFC is useful to steer traffic through an ordered list of service functions which apply some processing on the traffic. Network operators frequently deploy services in their network such as packet filtering, loadbalancing, proxies or other on-demand services. They act like black boxes inside the network by acting on the traffic steered through them. Those services can be deployed based on Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Architecture based on SFC and Network function virtualization enables to implement, deploy and maintain services with a high flexibility. Currently, Service Function Chaining and Segment Routing are not widely developed but generate interest in the academic and industry. We will explore and develop services that act on the user space, enabling development with ease. Moreover, we provided a development environment to create with ease new services, plus a development testing framework called Segment Routing Functional Testing which allows to easily test the proper functioning of Service Function Chaining with Segment Routing. We rely on the seg6ctl library which implements a memory-mapped NETLINK-based data transfer mechanism between kernel space and user space.