Network virtualization over heterogeneous federated infrastructures: Data plane connectivity

Federation of Future Internet (FI) infrastructures is an emerging requirement of the FI research community giving the ability to experimenters to use a variety of virtual appliances spread across different virtualized platforms. Federated architecture implementations, such as the Slice-based Federation Architecture (SFA), are capable of providing a unified way of interaction across domains but do not address the data plane interconnection problem, i.e. one virtual entity in one domain connecting at the data-link (Ethernet) layer with another virtual entity in a remote domain. This paper presents a novel scheme for interconnecting heterogeneous virtualized infrastructures at the data plane that considers concurrence, isolation, elasticity and programmability aspects. We tested and assessed our scheme using a software switch prototype that interconnects resources drawn from PlanetLab and FEDERICA virtualization infrastructures. Performance evaluation measurements indicate that our proposed stitching approach introduces minimal degradation on end-to-end delays and bandwidth between virtual entities, compared to physical (substrate) entities.