A programmable Controller for unified management of virtualized network infrastructures

Abstract

We are currently witnessing an evolution towards network virtualization and Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. SDN permits the decoupling of the control and data planes of traditional networks, and offers flexible and programmable networks. Besides, the need for dynamic provisioning and composition of networking services leads to the deployment of software components on virtualized network infrastructures. In this paper, we propose a unified management of networking and Information Technology resources and the exposure of management operations to the operator and to third-party service providers. For this sake, we introduce a programmable Controller that offers runtime reconfiguration of components. It exposes different management views according to operator or third-party applications' needs, and simplifies the automation of virtualized networking services. A networking use case is presented to evaluate the advantages of the proposed Controller, where our approach is compared to the control of both Linux Bonding and Click modules. Our Controller overcomes the limitations of virtual network functions management and provisioning approaches at the expense of a slight increase in execution time.