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.

An extended and flexible SDN control plane

“…In this paper, we propose a proof of concept using the Click platform [13], in which we have previously developed different modules [14]. Note that our solution could have been developed based on eBPF or even VPP, which are more adapted to virtualized environments.…”

“…To implement our distributed SDN controller function we use the programmable controller for unified management of virtualized network infrastructures proposed in [14]. Thus, this flexible controller function can be used for our SDN control plane in a distributed or in a hierarchical way.…”

“…For the needs of our demonstrator and to illustrate the proposed concepts, we extended the functionality of the Click controller agent introduced in [14]. This element offers a programmable automation mechanism where some actions can be performed, as a result of a logical/arithmetical combination of global or local element handlers, following a control expression written in an ad hoc language.…”