vSP: Building a virtual Service Provider with off-the-shelf cloud services

The ability to connect through several service providers, is becoming common in both residential and enterprise networks with a high potential to enabling rich cloud-based network services for all. However, traffic engineering in such context remains a challenge as having different service providers means as well having different, independent, provider-specific policies that seldom work together, while often being conflicting. To overcome the hassle of trying to have a coherent traffic engineering based on independent ISPs that would truly enable rich cloud-based network services, we propose to create an over-the-top virtual Service Provider — vSP. We show that based on existing cloud services and off-the-shelf technology it is possible to easily deploy its own vSP, including an easy to use management framework allowing full policies control so to have a coherent traffic engineering while fully exploiting the underlying ISPs and thus benefit from network services offloaded to the cloud.