A flow handover protocol to support state migration in softwarized networks

Softwarized networks are the key enabler for elastic, on‐demand service deployments of virtualized network functions. They allow to dynamically steer traffic through the network when new network functions are instantiated, or old ones are terminated. These scenarios become in particular challenging when stateful functions are involved, necessitating state management solutions to migrate state between the functions. The problem with existing solutions is that they typically embrace state migration and flow rerouting jointly, imposing a huge set of requirements on the on‐boarded virtualized network functions (VNFs), eg, solution‐specific state management interfaces. To change this, we introduce the seamless handover protocol (SHarP). An easy‐to‐use, loss‐less, and order‐preserving flow rerouting mechanism that is not fixed to a single state management approach. Using SHarP, VNF vendors are empowered to implement or use the state management solution of their choice. SHarP supports these solutions with additional information when flows are migrated. In this paper, we present SHarP's design, its open source prototype implementation, and show how SHarP significantly reduces the buffer usage at a central (SDN) controller, which is a typical bottleneck in state‐of‐the‐art solutions. Our experiments show that SHarP uses a constant amount of controller buffer, irrespective of the time taken to migrate the VNF state.