OpenFlow supporting inter-domain virtual machine migration

Today, Data Center Networks (DCNs) are re-architected in different new architectures in order to alleviate several emergent issues related to server virtualization and new traffic patterns, such as the limitation of bi-section bandwidth and workload migration. However, these new architectures will remain either proprietary or hidden in administrative domains, and interworking protocols will remain in-process of standardization for a time longer than the usually required time to market. Therefore, interworking cloud DCNs to provide the federated clouds is a very challenging issue that seems to be potentially alleviated by a software-defined networking (SDN) approach such as Openflow. In this paper, we propose a network infrastructure as a services (IaaS) software middleware solution based on Openflow in order to abstract the DCN architecture specifities and instantly interconnect DCNs. As a proof of concept we implement an experimental scenario dealing with virtual machine migration. Then, we evaluate the network setup and the migration delay. The use of the IaaS middleware allows automating these operations. OpenFlow solves the problem of interconnecting heterogeneous Data Centers and its implementation offers interesting delay values.