Next generation virtual network architecture for multi-tenant distributed clouds: challenges and emerging techniques

Abstract

Providing services for multiple tenants within a single or federated distributed cloud environment requires a variety of special considerations related to network design, provisioning, and operations. Especially important are multiple topics concerning the implementation of multiple parallel programmable virtual networks for large numbers of tenants, who require autonomous management, control, and data planes. This paper provides an overview of some of the challenges that arise from developing and implementing parallel programmable virtual networks, describes experiences with several experimental techniques for addressing those challenges based on large scale distributed testbeds, and presents the results of the experiments that were conducted. Distributed environments used include a distributed cloud testbed, the Chameleon Cloud, sponsored by the National Science Foundation's NSFCloud program, the NSF's Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), an international distributed OpenFlow testbed, and the Open Science Data Cloud.