Enterprise visor: A Software-Defined enterprise network resource management engine

The uptake of services delivered through Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is already very high. SDN provides programmability and automatic network control, and realizes the network virtualization for sharing network resources. In this work, a dynamic resource management scheme, called EnterpriseVisor engine, which is based on the OpenFlow/FlowVisor network virtualization platform, is designed to deploy network resources. The designed EnterpriseVisor engine firstly slices an enterprise network into numerous network slices and then monitors the resource utilization of each slice. In the engine, dynamic resource scheduling of each service slice is carried out by the Linear Programming method. The engine then sends the schedule to the Resource Allocation Policy of the FlowVisor layer for use by the data plane. An OpenFlow testbed is designed to verify the feasibility of the proposed EnterpriseVisor engine. The developed EnterpriseVisor engine has 25.7% and 13.4% higher network utilization than the basic OpenFlow and OpenFlow/Flowvisor platforms, respectively, with only a minor sacrifice of control message latency.