An architecture for end-to-end network slicing in multiple data centers using tableless source routing

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Valentim, Rodolfo Vieira
• Orientador(a): Villaca, Rodolfo da Silva
• Banca de defesa: Pasquini, Rafael , Martinello, Magnos
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo; Mestrado em Informática
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Informática
• Departamento: Centro Tecnológico
• País: BR
• Palavras-chave em Português: Computação em nuvem; NFV; VNF; SFC; OpenStack; Fatiamento de rede; Network slicing; Cloud computing
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: Ciência da Computação
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/14484

Telecommunication Service Providers (TSP) need to offer a wide range of services to their customers. The network functions virtualization (NFV), software-defined networks (SDN), and network slicing paradigms facilitate the deployment of these services by managing virtualized resources in a software-driven way. These paradigms have gained traction with the growth of new services that have different business demands, because their composition enhance programmability and innovation on top of COTS equipment and open-source tools. However, there are cases when these services are composed by functions hosted in geographically distant data centers (or clouds) in different domains. Telecommunication networks are almost ubiquitous, but multiple TSPs provide access to these networks, and each TSP has a footprint focused on a specific region. This market fragmentation makes it challenging to deploy cost-effective network services spanning multiple clouds and few works in the literature focus on the mechanisms for implementing the stitching of network slices from multiples service providers or infrastructures. In this context, this work presents a solution for implementing an end-to-end network slicing solution using tableless source routing. We propose the use of tableless source routing to specify a set of physical links, sub-networks, and network functions using a single piece of information without stacking protocol headers. At the same time, it improves scalability in the network core by reducing the number of forwarding states. Our proposal of the architecture has two main concerns. First, it needs to enable tableless source routing in data centers in a flexible, easy, and programmatic way, keeping compatibility with legacy applications hosted in these data centers. The second task and our major contribution is to perform the stitching of slicing segments in each data center in a way that abstracts from operators the huge amount of work required to perform these tasks. As a proof-of-concept, we implemented prototypes of the proposed solution with cutting edge cloud technologies, such as OpenFlow, OpenStack, and Open vSwitch. The results of functional and performance tests showed that the proposed solution enables end-to-end network slicing in a low-cost, efficient and flexible manner. Moreover, our proposal provides mechanisms to the NFV orchestrator that allow fine-grained traffic engineering decisions to optimize the selection of network paths and connections between domains.