FlowLAN: A non-tunneling distributed virtual network based on IPv6

In data centers, overlay networks are crucial to achieve network virtualization. Current dominant protocols like VXLAN and NVGRE use tunnels to implement overlay networks. IPv6 data centers are emerging, but current protocols treat IPv6 as a simple upgrade from IPv4, which introduces heavy tunneling overhead. In this paper, based on features of IPv6, we proposed a new non-tunneling distributed IPv6 virtual networks protocol called FlowLAN. Different from tunneling, FlowLAN rewrites header fields to include both physical and logical information of virtual machine, and uses flow label to identify tenant. Details of FlowLAN show that FlowLAN introduced no tunneling overhead, which increases throughput and reduces the processing cost. Experiment results show that FlowLAN has a better performance than IPv6 VXLAN, proving the feasibility of FlowLAN in IPv6 virtual networks.