Evaluation of a cloud federation approach based on Software Defined Networking

This paper introduces a Software Defined Networking based cloud federation approach, which enables a horizontal network federation between different cloud providers, based on a federated Software Defined Networking (SDN) layer. Thus, a new cloud federation agent is introduced, designed, and exemplary evaluated. The described agent is managing the set up and sustainment of a Software Defined Network on the underlying, federated cloud networks. Therefore it includes a virtualization component to virtualize the underlying physical SDN substrate. This offers tenants the opportunity to use the cloud´s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model with fine grained access to the virtualized SDN resources. Theses resources are exposed via an OpenFlow interface and deployed on top of the SDN virtualized control plane. This provides an innovative management and control capability of a virtual SDN (vSDN) substrate which gives tenants the freedom to deploy virtual network appliances or services, also known as Network Function Virtualization (NFV), on top of the allocated vSDN.