Multi-tenant isolation in a TRILL based multi-campus network

Cloud providers are showing an increasing interest in the TRILL protocol due to some of its capabilities such as: Virtual Machine mobility without connectivity interruption, a full non-blocking fabric, any-to-any connectivity without the use of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) standard, fault tolerance, and dynamic scalability. Above all, TRILL is easy to manage, plug-and-play, and does not require heavy configuration tasks to cope with virtual machine migration, changes to the network size, or physical connections. However, TRILL can not interconnect two independent networks without merging them. This is why we propose MLTP (Multi-Level TRILL Protocol) which adds a two-level hierarchy to TRILL. Each level 1 TRILL campus has independent control-plane and management while the level 2 TRILL network, the backbone, is shared between new devices, Border RBridges (BRBs) and Pseudo Gateways (PGs). This way networks can be decomposed in several smaller campuses, each one of them supervised by a different entity, thus simplifying network management. Additionally, MLTP offers a greater number of nicknames while providing tenant isolation, thus providing greater scalability. Those new functionalities are provided by MLTP without degrading throughput or latency performances as shown in our experiments.