Lack of open-source NSH-aware SFs is a major road block for NSH adoption in the industry. VPP is not only an open-sourced, high-performance vSwitch/vRouter alternative, but also targets a packet processing framework for VNF. VPP supports network functions like NAT44 and more network functions such as Load Balancer, Conntrack are under development, but they can not be used in NSH based SFC solution, simply because they can not recognize NSH.

This feature aims at using NSH_SFC plugin to manipulate NSH, specifically does the encapsulation and decapsulation, so VPP based network function graph nodes could focus on their own job manipulating the original frame in a NSH-unaware manner, while VPP + NSH_SFC are still NSH-aware. The initial design diagram will be posted on the Google doc for review, ant it is a stretch goal for 1701 release given coming Christmas holiday season.

It should not need OpenDaylight support to control NSH manipulation actions.

Note: will be updating this JIRA item once design document is uploaded to Google doc.