Enabling Multi-Tenants Isolation for Software-Defined Cloud Networks via XMPP and BGP: Implementation and Evaluation

BGP/MPLS IP VPN is a traditional L3 tunneling and inter-sites routing solution and it can be used for the intra Data Center (DC) network. With the emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN) scheme, BGP/MPLS IP VPN can be extended via the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) to provide a multi-tenants isolation solution for Software-Defined cloud networks. In this work, we propose and implement a multi-tenants isolation solution using the Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) framework which is a very popular open source SDN controller maintained by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF). We use XMPP protocol as its southbound interface. We show how this solution can be deployed and used in both real and emulated environments. A performance comparison between the XMPP and the OpenFlow-based SBIs is provided via experimentation results. The results demonstrate the efficiency and the scalability of the XMPP-based solution. Our work is modular and easily extensible, which enables new use cases based on ONOS.