VNCS: Virtual Network Connectivity as a Service a Software-Defined Networking Approach

Abstract

This paper presents VNCS (Virtual Network Connectivity as a Service), a network service that connects geographically separated enterprise branches based on the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) infrastructure. The VNCS service creates and manages Virtual SDNs (vSDN) for the tenant's sites that are logically decoupled from the network infrastructure, providing configurable network topology and isolation on the SDN network virtualization platform. VNCS service algorithms ensure the dynamic spawning of the tenant specified vSDN that satisfies its constraints with minimum connection cost based on the SDN providers' offers and tenant's specifications and preferences that are inputs to the VNCS algorithms interface. VNCS enables tenants to specify how their remote sites are to be connected along with a list of network constraints independently from the service provider and the infrastructure provider. The main contribution of this work resides in: (1) dynamically configuring, managing and maintaining interconnecting networks that link tenant's remote sites and (2) preserving tenants' constraints and network specifications by utilizing the SDN infrastructure through SDNbased network providers, thus relieving the tenant from the burden of configuring the network and dynamically meeting its constraints in a resilient approach and minimum cost. A test-bed proof-of-concept is implemented on top of the OpenVirtex (OVX) SDN network virtualization platform.