Federation-less federation of ProtoGENI and VNode platforms

Our previous work enabled “federation-less federation”, which means a federation of multiple network-virtualization platforms that do not support federation functions, and applied this method to a homogeneous federation of platforms called the “VNode” infrastructures. In this study, this method was applied to a heterogeneous federation of the ProtoGENI and the “VNode”. We intended to federate these platforms through a single management interface. However, the federation architecture of GENI, which is called the slice-based federation architecture (SFA), cannot be used for single-interface federation but we could not modify the ProtoGENI platform to enable it. Therefore, a method for applying federation-less-federation to ProtoGENI was developed. It enabled federation of these platforms by adding several nodes but without modifying preexisting platforms. This method was applied to federation of the ProtoGENI platform at the University of Utah and two VNode infrastructures in Japan, the slice creation and deletion time was measured and evaluated to be acceptable. Although this federation-less-federation implementation still has several minor problems, it was proved to be useful for experiments and demonstrations.