A Prototyping Platform to Validate and Verify Network Service Header-based Service Chains

Network service header (NSH) is considered to be a key enabler for the wide adoption of service function chaining (SFC), but the availability of NSH-enabled components, such as network functions, forwarders, or classifiers, is still very limited. One reason for this is the lack of experimentation and prototyping platforms for NSH. This paper aims to rectify this shortcoming by introducing a novel prototyping platform for NSH. Our platform uses an emulation-based approach to build a lightweight environment for containerized network functions and allows to create complex SFC experiments and prototypes, as we show in our evaluation. The presented platform is publicly available and aims to be a rapid prototyping tool for researchers and developers.