Ma, JiefeiRankothge, WindhyaMakaya, ChristianMorales, MariceliLe, FranckLobo, Jorge2021-02-052021-02-052018Ma J, Rankothge W, Makaya C, Morales M, Le F, Lobo J. An Overview of a load balancer architecture for VNF chains horizontal scaling. In: Salsano S, Riggio R, Ahmed T, Samak T, Raniery C, Dos Santos P, editors. 14th International Conference on Network and Service Management; 2018 Nov 5-9; Rome, Italy. New Jersey: IEEE; 2018. p. 323-7.2165-963Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/46356Comunicació presentada al 14th International Conference on Network and Service Management, celebrat del 5 al 9 de novembre de 2018 a Roma, Itàlia.We present an architectural design and a reference implementation for horizontal scaling of virtual network function chains. Our solution does not require any changes to network functions and is able to handle stateful network functions for which states may depend on both directions of the traffic. We use connection-aware traffic load balancers based on hashing function to maintain mappings between connections and the dynamically changing network function chains. Our references implementation uses OpenFlow switches to route traffic to the assigned network function instances according to the load balancer decisions. We conducted extensive simulations to test the feasibility of the architecture and evaluate the performance of our implementation.application/pdfeng© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. https://ieeexplore-ieee-org/document/8584973info:eu-repo/semantics/conferenceObjectinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess