  Network function virtualization (NFV) based service function chaining (SFC)
allows the provisioning of various security and traffic engineering
applications in a cloud network. Inefficient deployment of network functions
can lead to security violations and performance overhead. In an OpenFlow
enabled cloud, the key problem with current mechanisms is that several packet
field match and flow rule action sets associated with the network functions are
non-overlapping and can be parallelized for performance enhancement. We
introduce Network Function Parallelism (NFP) SFC-NFP for OpenFlow network. Our
solution utilizes network function parallelism over the OpenFlow rules to
improve SFC performance in the cloud network. We have utilized the DPDK
platform with an OpenFlow switch (OVS) for experimental analysis. Our solution
achieves a 1.40-1.90x reduction in latency for SFC in an OpenStack cloud
network managed by the SDN framework.
