FENet: An SDN-based scheme for virtual network management

Virtual networking is vital to efficient resource management in Clouds, and it is in fact one of the main services provided by many Cloud Computing platforms. Virtual network management needs to meet specific requirements, including tenant isolation and adaption to virtual machines' lifecycle. Most of the existing schemes for virtual network management are based on the use of overlay networks in order to achieve a desirable degree of flexibility. However, these schemes suffer from a common limit, i.e. relatively high performance penalty due to a complicated forwarding process. We address this performance concern by developing a new management scheme, FENet, which makes use of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) to create virtual networks and manage them via the SDN controller programs. We present the design of an SDN controller, with the definition of flow entry rules based on the OpenFlow protocol and the specification of a routing algorithm. The results from our experimental evaluation show that our SDN-based prototype can control virtual network interconnections and tenant isolation appropriately. FENet achieves about 30% better network performance than the management scheme based on OpenVPN and lower latency in comparison with the traditional bridging scheme.