Towards flexible, scalable and autonomic virtual tenant slices

Multi-tenant flexible, scalable and autonomic virtual networks isolation has long been a goal of the network research and industrial community. For today´s Software-Defined Networking (SDN) platforms, providing cloud tenants requirements for scalability, elasticity, and transparency is far from straightforward. SDN programmers typically enforce strict and inflexible traffic isolation resorting to low-level encapsulations mechanisms which help and facilitate network programmer reasoning about their complex slices behavior. In this paper, we propose SD-NMS, a novel software-defined architecture overcoming SDN and encapsulation techniques limitations. SD-NMS lifts several network virtualization roadblocks by combining these two separate approaches into an unified design. SD-NMS design leverages the benefits of SDN to provide Layer 2 (L2) isolation coupled with network overlay protocols with simple and flexible virtual tenant slices abstractions. This yields a network virtualization architecture that is both flexible, scalable and secure on one side, and self-manageable on the other. The experiment results showed that the proposed design offers negligible overhead and guarantees the network performance while achieving the desired isolation goals.