An Approach to Improve the Cooperation between Heterogeneous SDN Overlays

The overlay network has been widely developed in recent years. There may be various overlays that co-exist with each other upon the same underlying network. These overlays have heterogeneous performance goals, and they will compete for the physical resources, so that a sub-optimal performance of the overlays may be achieved. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the overlays makes them difficult to coordinate with each other to improve their performance. We introduce the concept of SDN to the deployment of overlay network and propose an approach to make the overlays cooperate with each other. A cooperative solution is proposed for co-existing overlays to improve their performance while leveraging their heterogeneous performance goals. Simulations are performed to evaluate the cooperative solution.