Control Channel Isolation in SDN Virtualization: A Machine Learning Approach

Performance isolation is an essential property that network virtualization must provide for clouds. This study addresses the performance isolation of the control plane in virtualized software-defined networking (SDN), which we call control channel isolation. First, we report that the control channel isolation is seriously broken in the existing network hypervisor in that the end-to-end control latency grows by up to 15 x as the number of virtual switches increases. This jeopardizes the key network operations, such as routing, in datacenters. To address this issue, we take a machine learning approach that learns from the past control traffic as time-series data. We propose a new network hypervisor, Meteor, that designs an LSTM autoencoder to predict the control traffic per virtual switch. Our evaluation results show that Meteor improves the processing latency per control message by up to 12.7x. Furthermore, Meteor reduces the end-to-end control latency by up to 73.7%, which makes it comparable to the non-virtualized SDN.