PAD: Policy Aware Data center network

Middle Boxes serve for the security in Data Center Networks (DCNs). Together with the growth of the services and applications in DCNs, flexible and scalable middle box deployment is highly required. The current middle box deployment methods are error prone. In this paper we propose Policy Aware Data center network (PAD), a flexible and scalable middle box provisioning architecture. PAD supports traditional Ethernet DCNs based on IP protocol. It allows DCN users freely define their traversal sequences of middle boxes without any complex configurations. PAD also makes DCN topology changing more easily, so VM migration, network expanding and so on can be easily implemented in PAD. PAD uses Policy Routing Information Injection (PRII) to control the middle boxes traversal, and simulation shows that PRII will bring no more than 6% throughput loss in practical utilization.