A Software-Defined Scalable and Autonomous Architecture for Multi-tenancy

Abstract

Scalability for distributed Data Center Networks (DCNs) has long been a goal of the network research and industrial community. To support dynamically increasing demands from multi-tenants, the network providers have to duplicate or share virtual resources for satisfying tenants' requests. However, current Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures have major drawbacks including lack of scalability and cross Virtual Tenant Network (VTN) communication. They rely only on the flexibility of control plane and neglect management plane important role. SDN scalability bottleneck affects directly the network/VTN scalability. In front of the fast growing network, it is widely accepted that the network of the future will require more capabilities such as self-awareness, self-control and self-management. At the core of these challenges is providing elastic isolation for multi-tenancy and involving tenant in management and control to reach the scalability objective and reduce the complexity of management operations of large DCNs. To address these challenges, the Open virtual Network Management and Security (Open vNMS) is proposed for supporting transparent multi-tenancy while both network and VTN scalability is solved. Basing on elastic L2 isolation using SDN components' flexibility, we design an autonomic architecture to provide self-control, self-management and self-adaptive capabilities for the network. The experiment results showed that the proposed design offers negligible overhead and guarantees the network performance.