5G: What is service function chaining and how it can be compared to the existing system ?

Question

We all know service function chaining is nothing but a directed path that an IP packet should follow. It is easy to implement service function chaining using the virtualization techniques such VNF (service running on virtual machine), Docker, LXC containers.
There is a possibility on delay increase for user IP packets when those packets pass through many service functions. What should be the right approach ?

Answer 1

At a very high level, Service Function Chaining is nothing but a directed path which should be followed by IP packets enters into one network. For example : If an IP packet reaches to edge of an enterprise network. Enterprise network may treat this IP packet in different ways till it reaches to end user.
In era of SDN, it is very easy to configure such directed path (a chain of NFVs) for an IP flow. So that IP packet moves through these different NFVs based. Even SDN has provision to configure different chains of NFVs for each user level. Now and days service function chaining becomes a hot cake because lot of stuff is being implemented in cloud computing and SDN.
Earlier also such kinds of paths were there but most of the configuration was manual and time consuming.