Enabling L2 network programmability in multi-tenant clouds

Abstract

With the advent of SDN, efforts on network virtualization have accelerated. Many concepts have been developed to enable the coexistence of multiple logical network domains on a shared networking infrastructure while also ensuring isolation between them. In this context, we envision a multi-tenant cloud environment that grants users the ability to dynamically alter the behaviour of the underlying network, thus achieving a truer sense of Infrastructure as a service. In this paper, we propose a method for providing users in multi-tenant cloud environments open APIs for installing custom flows into the network at layer 2 (L2). Our proposed system ensures tenant isolation while detecting possible flow-level conflicts that can lead to tenancy violations and to problems in end-to-end reachability. We prototyped our system on a nationwide testbed environment, which showed that our proposed method reduces flow-level conflict detection time over existing proposals from ms to μs scale.