SFC Path Tracer: A troubleshooting tool for Service Function Chaining

Abstract

Service Function Chaining (SFC) is a prominent research field in networking with several proposals from industry and academia. The lack of tools to check SFC path correctness forces network operators to spend a significant effort in guaranteeing that an SFC configuration meets their intent behavior. This work presents the SFC Path Tracer, a tool for troubleshooting SFC in NFV/SDN environments. The tool enables the identification of problems in an SFC configuration through the display of the whole path traversed by packets in a given SFC path. SFC Path Tracer is agnostic to the SFC encapsulation mechanism and incurs in low overhead on the SFC architecture.