Virtual data center networks embedding through Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) has opened new ways to design, deploy, and operate networks with new abstractions and programmability at network control and data planes. In this paper, we approach SDN to embed virtual data center networks employing the Network-as-a-Service model. The proposed architecture is built upon abstractions to create a virtual topology using BGP configurations that allow an efficient mapping to a physical network of OpenFlow 1.3 switches. In the control plane, an algorithm is designed to perform efficient allocation of network resources to virtual paths based on the data plane state, such as allocated virtual networks and resource utilization metrics. Requirements such as bandwidth and resilience are used to define the tenants policies and construct the virtual topology graph mappings. The experimental evaluation on an emulated testbed shows that the proposed algorithm performs efficient load balancing and altogether yields better utilization of the physical resources under different tenant traffic patterns.