What is Service Function Chaining (SFC)

The dawn of the 5G commercialization era brings the proliferation of advanced capabilities within the triptych of radio access network, end user devices, and edge cloud computing which hopefully propel the introduction of novel, complex multimodal services such as those that enlarge the physical world around us like mobile augmented reality. Managing such advanced services in a granular manner through the emerging architectures of microservices within a network functions virtualization (NFV) framework allows for several benefits but also raises some challenges. The aim of this chapter is to shed light into the architectural aspects of the above-envisioned virtualized mobile network ecosystem. More specifically, and as an example of advanced services, the authors discuss how augmented reality applications can be decomposed into several service components that can be located either at the end-user terminal or at the edge cloud.