Multi-site Connectivity for Edge Infrastructures : DIMINET:DIstributed Module for Inter-site NETworking

The deployment of a geo-distributed cloud infrastructure, leveraging for instance Point-of-Presences at the edge of the network, could better fit the requirements of Network Function Virtualization services and Internet of Things applications. The envisioned architecture to operate such a widely distributed infrastructure relies on executing one instance of a Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) per location and implement appropriate code to enable collaborations between them when needed. However, delivering the mechanisms that allow the collaborations is complex and error prone task. This is particularly true for the one in charge of establishing connectivity among VIM instances on-demand. Besides the reconfiguration of the network equipment, the main challenge is to design a mechanism that can offer usual network virtualization operations to the users while dealing with scalability and intermittent network properties of geo-distributed infrastructures.In this paper, we present how such a challenge can be tackled in the context of OpenStack. More precisely, we introduce DIMINET, a DIstributed Module for Inter-site NETworking services capable to interconnect independent networking resources in an automatized and transparent manner. DIMINET relies on a decentralized architecture where each agent communicates with others only if needed. Moreover, there is no global view of all networking resources but each agent is in charge of interconnecting resources that have been created locally. This approach enables us to mitigate management traffic and keep each site operational in case of network partitions. A promising approach to make other cloud-services collaborative on-demand.