Programmable virtual network as a service: towards a future Internet testbed based on IaaS cloud

During recently years, several OpenFlow-enabled testbeds have been deployed in world-wide research community. Typically, these OpenFlow-enabled testbeds need to stitch to other testbeds to link to virtual servers and immit experimentation traffic. From the view point of researchers, these OpenFlow-enabled testbeds only provide OpenFlow networking resource, and they have to resort to other experiment infrastructure to provide computing and storage resource. Due to the OpenFlow networking and other resource belongs to different infrastructure provider and is managed by their own control software, it is difficult to coordinate these partners to provide a full programmable experiment environment. Meanwhile, the control software of these testbeds are tight coupling with their substrate resources, which means that these substrate resources, together with virtualization technologies, are permanently dedicated to the control software and difficult to be used by other services. In this paper, a new future Internet testbed architecture based on the open Infrastructure-as-a-service cloud and software defined network (SDN) paradigm is proposed. It extends the current virtual network service by adding programmable virtual switch and controller resources that can be controlled by the researcher. Its loose coupling model allows the testbed operator decouple the experiment service from the infrastructure provider, which is a more flexible way to build the testbed. The initial prototype implementation in this paper shows that this new testbed architecture built on IaaS cloud and SDN is feasible and flexible to provide programmable virtual network service.