FlowVisor: A Network Virtualization Layer

TL;DR: This paper builds a research platform which allows multiple network experiments to run side-by-side with production traffic while still providing isolation and hardware forwarding speeds and presents a new approach to switch virtualization in which the same hardware forwarding plane can be shared among multiple logical networks, each with distinct forwarding logic.

Abstract: Network virtualization has long been a goal of of the network research community. With it, multiple isolated logical networks each with potentially different addressing and forwarding mechanisms can share the same physical infrastructure. Typically this is achieved by taking advantage of the flexibility of software (e.g. [20, 23]) or by duplicating components in (often specialized) hardware[19]. In this paper we present a new approach to switch virtualization in which the same hardware forwarding plane can be shared among multiple logical networks, each with distinct forwarding logic. We use this switch-level virtualization to build a research platform which allows multiple network experiments to run side-by-side with production traffic while still providing isolation and hardware forwarding speeds. We also show that this approach is compatible with commodity switching chipsets and does not require the use of programmable hardware such as FPGAs or network processors. We build and deploy this virtualization platform on our own production network and demonstrate its use in practice by running five experiments simultaneously within a campus network. Further, we quantify the overhead of our approach and evaluate the completeness of the isolation between virtual slices.