PDSDN: A Policy-Driven SDN Controller Improving Scheme for Multi-tenant Cloud Datacenter Environments

There is a trend that more and more enterprises utilize SDN (Software Defined Network) technology to manage the network of their cloud platform. For example, cloud computing datacenters define their own virtual networks or virtual firewalls using SDN controller. Tenants need the network components of cloud platform to call northbound interfaces of SDN controller if they want to manage the network of cloud platform. If there are a large number of tenants, the interaction between the cloud platform and the SDN controller is very frequent. In order to simplify this process, we propose a policy-driven based batch processing network operation SDN controller scheme in which the cloud datacenter manager sends the SDN-related policies to the SDN controller, and the SDN controller processes the policies received according to user's permissions and operations priority. The management of network resources can integrate with other resources management in the cloud datacenter environment effectively. We then build a prototype, a policy-driven SDN controller (PDSDN), to demonstrate the efficiency and performance of our design.