Virtual network flavors: Differentiated traffic forwarding for cloud tenants

Abstract

Today, a cloud system user can select a specific type of virtual machine for deployment based on needs, for instance memory or storage size. In terms of networking, however, no similar mechanism exists which allows users to select a virtual network based on characteristics such as link speed and QoS. The lack of such a mechanism makes it difficult for users to manage VM instances along their associated networks. This limits the efficacy and scalability of cloud computing suppliers. This paper presents a novel approach for defining virtual network flavors and differentiated forwarding of traffic across the underlay networks. The flavors enable tenants to select network properties including maximum rate, maximum number of hops between two VMs, and priority. Measures such as metering, prioritizing, and shaping facilitate steering traffic through a set of paths to satisfy tenants’ requirements. These measures are designed such that the legacy parts of the underlay network can also benefit from them. Software Defined Networking (SDN) mechanisms are an essential part of the solution, where the underlay and overlay networks are managed by a network operating system. The implementation and evaluation data are available for further development [2].