Multi-tenant network monitoring based on software defined networking

Abstract

In any cloud service model multiple stakeholders are involved with different roles in the service provider-customer relationship. One service provider can use other services at the same time. It is vital to distinguish between stakeholders activities such as their communication in the network. Thus, there should be a monitoring system, which knows about stakeholders, their characteristics, and provisioned resources by them at any point of time. In most cases, traditional monitoring solutions does not have the capability to understand the difference between involved parties, while they're orchestrated to achieve a desired result (e.g. delivering a service for the end user). In this study an improved architecture of the networking service for a cloud platform is introduced. Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Virtualization, and traditional methods are adapted for gathering evidence and auditing activities on a per-tenant basis. Four approaches are investigated for monitoring and identifying tenants' traffic in an infrastructure. They are discussed and implemented to fulfil the cloud's network monitoring requirements. The focus is on the effectiveness of software defined networking for monitoring tenants' virtual networks. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.