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Service Function Chaining (SFC) is an enabling technology to provide end-to-end service differentiation according to specific user requirements. Although emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) are perfect enablers for SFC, hardware limitation of Ternary-Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs) can be an obstacle when handling a large variability of SFC requests, derived from the increasing number of users, and the heterogeneity of applications and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. This article introduces and investigates the problem of TCAM size limitation on the classification procedure of SFC requests in SDN-based SFC environments. To overcome this limitation, the classification of incoming SFC requests is proposed to be offloaded to transient nodes when the occupation of the ingress node flow table is close to its maximum. An …