Network in the Cloud: A map-and-encap approach

Data communications are essential in today's economy and most of enterprises rely on a fast and reliable Internet connection to control their production or sales. However, the cost of maintaining Internet connectivity is not negligible, as it requires manpower and capital immobilization. In order to limit the cost of data communications as well as to improve their flexibility, Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) has been proposed. The concept of NaaS is to outsource to the Cloud networking operations like load balancing or firewall. In this paper, we propose a technique based on the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) to allow enterprise networks to effectively outsource their network operations to the Cloud.