Federated Service Chaining: Architecture and Challenges

Emerging edge computing has seen latency- sensitive services moving rapidly from cloud to the edge to take advantage of its close vicinity to end users, while cloud is retained for carrying out latency-insensitive and computation-intensive tasks. When more edge computing service providers come to the market, the network will become increasingly more fragmented because of their proprietary services and policies deployed in the network. This means that the Internet can become more cumbersome and riskier as there will be more tiers and potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited. To tackle this issue, we envisage a federated service chaining paradigm in which operators can share and put service functions in other participants' networks so as to improve resource utilization, collaboratively mitigate cyber threats, and enable service innovations. In this position article, building on our past experience in enabling federated cloud infrastructure and heterogeneous service chaining, we present a Federated Service Chaining architecture followed by discussions of its key components. Several key research challenges are described for the successful realization of such architecture. We hope this article can open a discussion in the research community and generate enough research interest to significantly advance this field.