Multi-Tenant Programmable Switch Virtualization Leveraging Explicit Resource Sharing

With the migration of traditional computer networks to the Software-defined Networking paradigm, flexibility is a core feature that novel technologies must provide. In this context, virtualization is gaining traction in Programmable Data Planes (PDPs) as a means of achieving greater flexibility, with several solutions in the literature for instantiating virtual programmable switches on the same host device. Virtualization brings numerous advantages, enabling multi-tenancy in programmable data/research center networks and greater device resource utilization. Nevertheless, enabling a complete multitenant solution, in which the tenants have disjoint sets of virtual devices, requires management and security considerations not yet approached in previous investigations. Previous works focus mainly on the core underlying technology necessary to deploy multiple devices in the same physical host. This paper presents a PDP virtualization architecture based on program composition and access control for securely managing virtual switches from different tenants. Additionally, we define extensions to PDP programmability, allowing tenants to specify shared elements, such as tables, between their virtual devices. Our experiments highlight the ability to transparently manage multiple virtual switches hosted in the same physical device in networking scenarios with multiple tenants.