BGP Flowspec for IETF Network Slice Traffic Steering

BGP Flow Specification (Flowspec) provides a mechanism to distribute traffic Flow Specifications and the forwarding actions to be performed to the specific traffic flows. A set of Flowspec components are defined to specify the matching criteria that can be applied to the packet, and a set of BGP extended communities are defined to encode the actions a routing system can take on a packet which matches the flow specification. An IETF Network Slice enables connectivity between a set of Service Demarcation Points (SDPs) with specific Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Expectations (SLEs) over a common underlay network. To meet the connectivity and performance requirements of network slice services, network slice service traffic may need to be mapped to a corresponding Network Resource Partition (NRP). The edge nodes of the NRP needs to identify the traffic flows of specific connectivity constructs of network slices, and steer the matched traffic into the corresponding NRP, or a specific path within the corresponding NRP. BGP Flowspec can be used to distribute the matching criteria and the forwarding actions to be performed on network slice service traffic. The existing Flowspec components can be reused for the matching of network slice services flows at the edge of an NRP. New components and traffic action may need to be defined for steering network slice service flows into the corresponding NRP. This document defines the extensions to BGP Flowspec for IETF network slice traffic steering (NS-TS).