Research On Multi-tenants Based Policy-driven Software Defined Networking In Cloud Computing Environment

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a network architecture model proposed in recent years. It can be applied to cloud computing datacenter, enterprise networks, etc. SDN has the features such as easy-to-manage and high security level. Cloud Computing is a service model also proposed in recent years. Cloud Computing can provide computing service, storage service and network service through virtualization technologies and through the integration of resources. Combining cloud computing with SDN can ease the management of cloud computing datacenter and extends the services that can be provided to cloud computing tenants, such as network virtualization and virtual firewall.However, applying SDN to cloud computing datacenter still faces some difficulties now. The difficulties are:1. The SDN controller is not fully integrated with cloud controller; 2. Tenants cannot self-define their own virtual networks or virtual firewalls in an easy way; 3. Parallel processing efficiency of SDN controller is not high enough. To solve these problems, in this paper we propose a multi-tenants based policy-driven SDN mechanism.Managing networks with policies can achieve a wide range of benefits. Firstly, tenants can manage their own network services, such as virtual networks and virtual firewalls, in an intuitive way rather than writing applications or explicitly call SDN controller APIs. Secondly, the SDN-related policies can be fully integrated with access control policies or storage policies in Amazon AWS or some other cloud computing platform. This can be used for integrating SDN controller with cloud controller, which can further ease the management of the whole cloud computing platform. Finally, managing the network through policies rather than through calling the SDN controller APIs can gain better efficiency. This reflects in that policy-driven SDN can lower the CPU load to some extent and reduce the processing time in a massive way.The last part of the paper describes the validity and efficiency of policy-driven SDN. The experiments compared the performance of policy-driven SDN, local API call and REST API call under two use-cases:create virtual networks and create virtual firewalls. The results of the experiments show that policy-driven SDN can achieve better performance compared with REST API call and is close to the performance of local API call.Thus, in a cloud computing environment, multi-tenants based policy-driven SDN ensures the user friendliness and unifies the management of computing resources, storage resources and network resources. Furthermore, policy-driven SDN also shows that it can achieve good performance. In conclusion, multi-tenants based policy-driven SDN is a good solution regarding to applying SDN to cloud computing datacenters.