Abstraction Layer Based Virtual Data Center Architecture for Network Function Chaining

Network virtualization is one of the most promising technology for the data centers. It was innovated to use the network resources efficiently to evaluate new protocols and services on the same hardware. This paper discusses a virtual distributed data center network architecture in the network function virtualization environment. This architecture virtualize physical resources into multiple virtual clusters where each cluster consists of a group of machines (physical/virtual) and an abstraction layer. Optical technologies are used to construct the core of the network. Our abstraction layer construction algorithm selects the minimum optical switches that provide connectivity to all the machines of the group. One of the main use case of this architecture is orchestration of network function chains, where each chain corresponds to one cluster and network functions can be deployed over the optical switches of the abstraction layer. We also showed that this deployment can also save expensive optical/electronic/optical conversion cost.