A Stateful Security Service Chaining for Mobile-Edge Computing

Abstract

We see an increasing demand for user-defined security service in mobile networks and the trend
is to deploy IT based services in a mobile-edge cloud in the future. However, it lacks a flexible
and efficient architecture to provide dynamically changing security services for different users in the
mobile-edge cloud. To address this problem, we purpose an architecture of mobile-edge stateful security
service chaining, which achieves a scalable combination of various required security functions.
In addition, we present the stateful service function proxy, aiming to support compatibility to traditional
security functions and convert them into stateful functions to shorten the transmission time of
packets. Much work has been done to implement the proof-of-concept testbed of the architecture,
and experimental results verify its feasibility. Moreover, we compare the performance of the proxy in
the stateful mode with that in the stateless mode, and the result proves that the proxy running in the
stateful mode can significantly decrease the transmission time of packets and improve the forwarding
efficiency.