SR-PVX: A Source Routing Based Network Virtualization Hypervisor to Enable POF-FIS Programmability in vSDNs

We design and implement a novel network virtualization hypervisor (NVH), which leverages source routing (SR) and provides network programmability based on the protocol-oblivious forwarding flow instruction set (POF-FIS), to realize protocol-independent virtual software-defined networks (vSDNs). The NVH, namely SR-PVX, uses a novel SR-based mechanism to ensure that the substrate switches can process packets from vSDNs with very small flow-table consumption. We design the network architecture, packet format, and packet processing procedure, and implement them to experimentally demonstrate that SR-PVX can control substrate POF switches to accomplish the SR-based vSDN slicing. We also perform an experiment to show that the POF-enabled vSDN created by SR-PVX can easily realize a stateful firewall with its POF-FIS programmability.