Networking agent for overlay L2 routing and overlay to underlay external networks L3 routing using OpenFlow and Open vSwitch

Abstract

Overlay L2 routing and overlay to underlay L3 routing in OpenStack involves usage of Host Machine's TCP/IP Stack, iptables rules and Linux Kernel. This paper introduces a networking module which minimizes load on Host TCP/IP Stack and is independent of iptables rules / Linux Kernel for networking. This paper implements Proof-of-Concept (POC) of a networking agent for OpenStack's Networking Module-Neutron via software-defined networking (SDN). This paper implements a method for overlay L2 networking, overlay to underlay L3 routing and virtualizes Neutron's routing instance using Open vSwitch (OVS) and OpenFlow protocol. This paper aims to explore the scope of implementing the networking functionalities and network virtualization using SDN technologies in OpenStack. This paper concludes by comparing networking performance in terms of collective TCP bandwidth measurement of the POC against the existing OpenStack setup.