Demonstrating generalized virtual topologies in an openflow network

Abstract

Network Virtualization (NV) is one of the most promising approaches to enable innovation in today’s network. Generally speaking, NV refers to the possibility of pooling together low–level hardware and software resources belonging to a networked system into a single administrative entity. In such a way network resources could be effectively shared in a transparent way among different logical network instances corresponding to different virtual network topologies. A recent approach toward Network Virtualization has been proposed through FlowVisor [1], whose aim is to leverage on the specific features of an OpenFlow–controlled network [2] to share the same hardware forwarding plane among multiple logical networks. As highlighted by the authors in [1], one of the major limitations of FlowVisor is the inability to establish virtual topologies not restricted by the underpinning physical topology. As a consequence, FlowVisor is unable to provide researchers flexibility in designing their experiments with arbitrary network topologies on a defined physical infrastructure. The architecture presented in Chapter 2 of this paper, called ADVisor (ADvanced FlowVisor), provides the functionalities to overcome the above-mentioned FlowVisor’s limitation by allowing the instantiation of generalized virtual topologies in a OpenFlow network through the implementation of virtual links as aggregation of multiple physical links and OpenFlow-enabled switches. In this demo we will show the configuration of a simple virtual topology performed through a Web-based control framework which allows the reservation of network resources (nodes, links and bandwidth) and the management of virtual resources (virtual links and virtual ports). We will also demonstrate the effective instantiation of the virtual topology by running a synthetic traffic generator application.