libNetVirt: The network virtualization library

Abstract

Abstract-Network virtualization has been an important research topic for many years but still suffers from the lack of an abstraction level like the one present in virtualization of computing and storage. Our work in progress presented here proposes an architecture for such a network virtualization abstraction. It is deployed as a library, similar to libvirt in computer virtualization, with a unified interface towards the underlying network specific drivers. The architecture will allow management tools to be independent of the underlying technologies. In addition, it will enable programmatic and on-demand creation of virtual networks. A common set of calls is defined to instantiate different virtual networks, using a single node view to provide the user with a suitable abstraction of the network. We describe a prototype of our proposed architecture on top of an OpenFlow-enabled network. We demonstrate its feasibility for creating isolated virtual networks in a programmatic and on demand fashion.

Using libNetVirt to control the virtual network

“…This paper is a continuation of the architecture work presented in [2]. The architecture has been extended, adding capabilities to support L3 networks.…”

“…LibNetVirt [2] is a C library with Python wrappers, which provides an abstraction for the network where the minimum requirement for the user is to provide the endpoints to interconnect. This section describes the network view, the main elements of the architecture and the basic operations.…”

“…libNetVirt [2], a previous work from the authors, defines a common set of network abstractions to allow users to easily provide programmable network resources in a similar way to how machine virtualization is done. It provides a unified framework for network virtualization is necessary to expand network functionalities and to provide a single network view.…”

Performance evaluation of openflow controllers for network virtualization

“…It is written in C and Python. We have implemented a network virtualization application for NOX that connects with LibNetVirt [14]. LibNetVirt is a library for network virtualization that permits to use different technologies to control the network, OpenFlow being one of them.…”

“…Our reasons for this is that we believe that network virtualization will be a key application for OpenFlow, since it permits to remotely control the packet forwarding. In addition, we want to compare our previous work [14] to other OpenFlow controllers with similar functionalities.…”