Interconnection Of Heterogeneous Network Virtualization Technology In Cloud Computing

With the extensive deployment of multi-tenant large-scale cloud data center, both industry and academia carried out varies kinds of network virtualization technologies to deal with the new challenges. Each technology has its own advantages and disadvantages and none of them have been widely adopted. The cloud service providers may choose their respective technologies according to the business need, cost, vendor inertia, etc., which results in the heterogeneity in network virtualization. On the other hand, the upgrade of data center and the development of multi-site cloud services make an urgent need for interconnecting virtual networks of different technologies and integrating heterogeneous network resources to provide virtual network service.The current works mainly focus on the development of message interfaces among network virtualization platforms, but do not solve the problem on address learning and data forwarding among heterogeneous networks. This paper presents network virtualization interconnection technology that aims to interconnect both control and data plane. This technology decouples virtual network from specific virtualization technology, so that a single virtual network could exists across varies kinds of network virtualization zones while maintaining layer 2 and layer 3 network connectivity. We first analyses the challenges in realizing heterogeneous network virtualization interconnection, then we summarize several general interconnection models and make a brief comparison among these models. With this discussion, we propose a software-defined network based solution: Omni-Bridge, which introduce a virtual network controller to interconnect the control planes and zone gateways to interconnect the data planes. Besides, we discuss how to integrate Omni-Bridge with cloud platform Open Stack and implement a prototype to test and assess our scheme. The function evaluation indicates that our proposed solution could interconnect VLAN and VXLAN zones, and integrated with MPLS-VPN, a layer-2 VPN technology.